A software engineer spent 4 years building his own graphics card. His FuryGPU achieves solid 60 FPS in the 28-year-old Quake.
Most graphics cards found in gaming PCs today come from either AMD or Nvidia, which often need additional support due to their massive size.
A developer in the gaming industry can now claim to do without a model from either manufacturer.
Over a period of 4 years, software engineer Dylan Barrie built his own graphics card. His FuryGPU delivers enough power to play Quake at 720p resolution with 60 FPS.
FuryGPU with enough performance for 60 FPS at 720p resolution
What kind of graphics card is this? The FuryGPU is a fully functioning graphics card created by software engineer Dylan Barrie. He worked alone on his project for a total of 4 years and documents it on furygpu.com.
Like any other standard graphics card, the FuryGPU is inserted into a computer’s PCIe slot. Therefore, the same rules apply when removing it, to avoid damaging your hardware. Using an HDMI or DisplayPort connection, a monitor can be connected to the pixel accelerator.
The graphics card has enough power to render Quake in 720p resolution at 60 FPS. On his YouTube channel, he showcases in a short video the performance of his graphics card in the 1996 shooter.
How did he go about it? Thanks to his professional experience in the gaming industry, he already had experience with software rendering of 3D graphics through graphics card hardware. With the project, he aimed to learn more about how the hardware side is built and works in detail.
He learned all the necessary skills through self-study. Once Barrie had all the required components, he could put his project into action.
For his self-development, Barrie used an FPGA. This ‘Field Programmable Gate Array’ is a freely programmable digital building block that includes multiple circuits. The logic gates (Gate Arrays) can be assigned various functions.
Were there any difficulties? He described the design and final layout of the graphics card as a Herculean task. He spent several months solely on creating the layout and the problems associated with it using KiCad (a program for developing circuit boards in electronics).
According to him, the biggest challenge was programming the appropriate Windows drivers so that the graphics card was fully recognized and utilized by the operating system. He has to forgo functions like Nvidia’s DLSS, for instance.
In the future, Barrie wants to make performance optimizations. He intends to provide knowledge about his project to the public once legal issues are clarified.
60 FPS in Quake is an impressive achievement for a self-built graphics card. That’s even more frames per second than a gaming PC that cost significantly more: Player builds 1,800 Euro gaming PC, has only a meager 6 FPS in games – The solution is surprisingly simple
