This Guy BUILT His Own Graphics Card!

Most of you will know that you can build your own PC, but have you ever thought about building your own

graphics

card

at home? It sounds absolutely crazy, but one guy really did it recently, software engineer Dylan Barry has created a fully assembled prototype which he calls the Fury GPU. and we sat down with him to find out exactly how he pulled

this

from the heart of the fury. The GPU design is a zinc ultrascale plus custom fpga from zyink which is now an AM brand and if you're not sure what an fpga is, it means for a field programmable gate array, essentially it's a device that can configured to be more specialized for certain applications, as opposed to a more typical desktop CPU which is designed in a more general way so that it can run many different types of applications.

The fpga includes a small Arm processor that can run Linux, but the rest can be programmed to render

graphics

with a hardware description language or HDL that tells the fbga how to actually organize its internal circuitry, small cells that can accept many different types. of logical functions using his knowledge of Barry, a graphics engineer, was able to build an optimized architecture for graphics rendering, a process that took over 3 years, starting with simply getting an image on a screen and then creating support for drawing polygons, applying textures and combine textures because commercial GPU designs are Barry's trade secrets.

I had to start completely from scratch rather than using a current GPU as a starting point, which explains why it took so long, but once the fpga is complete you of course need a real board to install it on so it can act as a functional graphics

card

, since I know you can't just insert a simple fpga into a normal motherboard. I mean, you can do it, you're just not going to have a good time, so Barry also designed the Fury gpus board, a process that he said took about 1 month and involved some serious thinking. How to place the components on the board, details such as trace length were very important as the various traces that feed the PCIe connector must be a very similar length to help with the signal.

The integrity location of these traces was also important to avoid cross-talk. He didn't want them too close together and also had to consider what kind of power supplies to put on the card, since the fpga itself needs a different voltage compared to the display outputs. After Barry got his board design right, he sent the files to a PCB Fab in China and got some PCBs back, but keep in mind they were just boards, meaning to get a working graphics card he had to install himself. itself over 400 individual components such as capacitors and resistors, which of course involved a lot of tedious soldering assembly and testing the hardware itself took Barry about another 2 months, but in the end he got a board that was not very different from some graphics cards from the 1990s, but with modern displays and PCI Express GPU you probably have in your desktop.

We're talking less than a megabyte per frame, as it was designed with mid-1999 gaming in mind, but even a perfectly executed piece of hardware. It's useless without the right software, so we'll tell you the final piece of the puzzle right after thanking Paperlike for sponsoring today's video. Protect your new iPad with a Paperlike screen protector. Paperlike 2.1 is made in Switzerland and designed to help you. write and draw on your iPad just as you would on paper. It uses its exclusive microe technology called Nano two to emulate the trace resistance of paper without sacrificing screen clarity. Clarity and Paper are so confident in their screen protector that they offer a 100-day satisfaction guarantee.

It means if you are not satisfied with your screen protector, they will offer you a free M replacement or refund within 100 days, so be sure to check out Paperlike at the link below as any Fury GPU graphics card needs some kind of controller to be able to run Barry said it took him about 4 months to get the controllers working. Windows generally requires drivers to use an architecture called wddm and that requires support for hardware features you would only find on mass-produced GPUs, such as support for modern versions of direct. 3D To fix

this

, the Fury GPU driver is designed in such a way that Windows sees it as a kernel-mode display-only driver, which basically means that it will consider the Fury GPU as a simpler device that only displays an image instead of performing a real representation. the driver itself can switch modes and allow the GPU to actually render frames, thereby tricking Windows into thinking it's only displaying the desktop when it's actually displaying the game you're playing. cheats enabled. the final product uses a custom API similar to Vulcan, and Barry was able to modify the renderer of the original 1996 Quake to run at 720p at around 60 frames per second.

Unfortunately, it still doesn't support modern shaders that would allow for more lighting effects and other types of visual appeal. We're all used to it nowadays, Barry told us that Shader support might come in the future, but fpga's have their limits compared to conventional gpus as they sacrifice performance for customization. We may also see other games from the mid 90s ported to the fury GPU, but can you really get a Fury GPU and play with it? I'm sure you're asking. Barry made it clear that this is primarily a passion project and that he has no plans to produce the Fury GPU for sale, esp. as it's a continuous work in progress currently operating in a full development environment, so it's not like you can just pop it into your Windows PC, install the drivers and have everything work perfectly, it's still a testament great what you can achieve with enough time, effort and patience with a soldering iron, thanks for watching, if you like the video check out our other video on how cpu's and gpus's are different, comment below with video suggestions and don't forget to subscribe and follow techwiki, you've seen a couple of other videos and you didn't do that so don't forget.