3dfx Velocity 100 hack

This is a really amazing video card. To look at, it seems to be a crappy business-orientated card with minimal 3d acceleration, but on closer inspection turns out to be a Voodoo3 2000 with only 8Mb of RAM. In order to not impinge on their Voodoo sales, 3dfx have disabled one of the two texture units, crippling performance; at least, until the card's owner Regedits to

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\
Class\Display\0000\Glide

creates the string value

FX_GLIDE_NUM_TMU

and sets its value to 2. This re-enables the second texture unit. Note if the Velocity wasn't the first video card installed in the system, the 0000 number might be 0001, or similar.

Then, a quick download of PowerStrip allows the card to be overclocked from 143MHz to about 160 - more may be possible with cooling, but on my unit I can do this 100% stable without so much as a case fan.

The result is a card almost as fast as a Voodoo3 3000, albeit with half the RAM. And all for £40! More details and some benchmarks can be found in the Anandtech review (it's in the Video Cards Review Index).