A gift from someone.

A revision G of the famous Diamond Monster 3D boards. It has a 500-0004-02 TMU and 500-0003-03 FBI. The TMU is the Texture Mapping Unit and places the textures onto 'things'. The FBI (Frame Buffer Interface) combines colors, adds fog and is able to do alpha blending, dithering and stuff like that. These two chips together are the actual Voodoo Graphics chipset. > Read more

And another Monster 3D. This time it's an E-revision. Maybe I have too much of these boards, or maybe not. Practically every board is a bit of unique, however. This one has GLT44017-40J4 RAM which was unknown to me. GLT stands for 'Galvantech Inc.' > Read more

Another Diamond Monster 3D! And another and another. This is just a regular board . > Read more

Another one in million Diamond Monster 3D Voodoo card. What can I say about it? Check out the other Diamond Monster 3D entries! > Read more

And yes, another Monster 3D! This time it's a Europe retail model which includes a box and game CD's . This was 'the' 3D upgrade back then. People didn't install a 3Dfx card. No, they installed a Monster3D card. Not realizing it was a 3Dfx card after all.

The Voodoo Graphics chipset consists of two chips. A TMU and FBI chip. The TMU is the Texture Mapping Unit and places the textures onto 'things'. The FBI (Frame Buffer Interface) combines colors, adds fog and is able to do alpha blending, dithering and stuff like that. These two chips together are the actual Voodoo Graphics chipset. Small sidenote: the 3dfx technical specs refer to TREX instead of TMU. Most people refer to TMU because 'TMU' is printed onto the packaging of the chip. TREX stands for Texture Raster Engine.



This is a diagram of the Voodoo Graphics. It speaks practically for itself. See how chips are combined and think about having two or even three TMU (TREX) chips! Three TREX chained together provide single-pass, full-speed rendering of all supported advanced texture mapping features. For example: this means you can do trilinear filtering with mipmapping in one pass. A board with 'only' two chips would need two passes and a board with one chip is not capable of doing trilinear filtering with mipmapping. > Read more