The 3Dfx Velocity 100 is a budget AGP graphics card released in 1999, based directly on the Voodoo3 architecture. It was aimed at the low end of the market and sold for around $50, largely through OEM channels. I made a whole video about it — The Secret 3Dfx Graphics Card (You Never Knew Existed).
What it is
Hardware-wise the Velocity 100 is close to a Voodoo3 2000. It runs at the same 143 MHz core and memory clock, uses the same Avenger chip, and outputs a single unified 2D/3D pipeline — no pass-through cable, unlike the earlier Voodoo and Voodoo2.
The differences are cost-cutting ones:
- 8 MB of SGRAM instead of 16 MB
- only one texture mapping unit (TMU) exposed in OpenGL and Glide
Both TMUs are physically present and both work under Direct3D. 3Dfx disabled the second one in the OpenGL and Glide drivers to stop the smaller 8 MB framebuffer being overwhelmed at higher resolutions.
Turning the second TMU back on
This is the card’s claim to fame. A documented Windows registry change re-enables the second TMU for OpenGL and Glide, moving the core configuration from 1:0:1:1 to 1:0:2:1 — the same as a Voodoo3 2000. With it applied, the Velocity 100 performs virtually identically to a Voodoo3 2000 in Glide and OpenGL titles like Quake III and Expendable. It effectively becomes the card it was cut down from.
Where it fits
For a period Windows 98 build it is a cheap way onto the Voodoo3 / Glide 2 platform, provided you apply the tweak and keep resolutions sensible given the 8 MB of memory. If you can find a plain Voodoo3 for a similar price, that is the simpler buy.
