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 sounds absolutely crazy but one guy
actually did this recently software engineer Dylan Barry has put together a
fully assembled prototype he calls Fury GPU and we sat down with him to find out
exactly how he pulled this off the heart of the fury GPU design is a custom zinc
ultrascale plus fpga from zyink which is
now an AM dbrand and if you're not sure what an fpga is it stands for field
programmable gate array essentially it's a device that you can configure to be
more specialized for certain applications as opposed to a more
typical desktop CPU that's designed in a more General way so it can run many
different types of applications the fpga does include a small ARM processor that
can run Linux but the rest of it can be programmed to render graphics with a
hardware description language or HDL which tells the fbga how to actually
organize its internal circuitry small cells that can accept many different
types of logic functions using his knowledge of Graphics engineering Barry
was able to build an architecture optimized for graphics rendering a
process that took over 3 years starting from Simply getting an image on a screen
then building in support for drawing polygons applying textures and blending
textures together because commercial GPU designs are Trade Secrets Barry had to
completely start from scratch instead of using a current GPU as a starting point
explaining why it took so long but once the fpga is completed you of course need
an actual board to install it on so it can act as a functional graphics card
since you know you can't just insert a bare fpga into a regular motherboard I
mean you can it just you're not going to have a good time therefore Barry also
designed Fury gpus board a process he said took around 1 month and involved
thinking carefully about how to lay components out on the board details like
Trace length were very important as the various traces that feed the PCIe
connector need to be very similar in length to help with signal Integrity
placement of these traces was also important to avoid cross talk you don't
want them too close together and he also had to consider what kind of power
supplies to put on the card as the fpga itself needs a different voltage
compared to the display outs after Barry got his board design right he then sent
the files off to a PCB Fab in China and
got back well some pcbs but keep in mind
these were only boards meaning that to get a working graphics card he had to
install over 400 individual components such as capacitors and resistors himself
which of course involved lots of tedious soldering assembling and testing the
hardware itself took Barry around another 2 months but at the end he had a
card that wasn't too different looking from some graphics cards from the 1990s
but with modern display outs and PCI
Express X4 support and although current commercial graphics cards typically use
x16 Fury GPU gets away with X4 as it
moves far less data than the GPU you probably have in your desktop rig we're
talking less than one megabyte per frame as it was designed with mid99s games in
mind but even a perfectly executed piece of Hardware is useless without the right
software so we'll tell you about the final piece of the puzzle right after we
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to check out paperlike at the link below like any graphics card Fury GPU needs
some kind of driver in order to run Barry said it took him about 4 months to
get the drivers to work Windows typically requires drivers to use an
architecture called wddm and that
requires support for Hardware features you'd only find in mass-produced gpus
such as support for modern versions of direct 3D to get around this the fury
GPU driver is designed such that Windows
instead sees it as a kernel mode display only driver which basically means that
it will consider Fury GPU as being a simpler device that just displays an
image instead of doing any actual rendering however the driver itself can
switch modes and allow the GPU to actually render frames so it kind of
tricks Windows into thinking it's just showing the desktop when it's actually
showing the game you're playing game
cheats enabled the fin product uses a custom API that's similar to Vulcan and
Barry was able to modify the renderer for the original Quake from 1996 getting
it to run at 720p at around 60 frames per second unfortunately it doesn't yet
support modern shaders which would allow for more lighting effects and other
kinds of eye candy we're all used to today Barry told us that Shader support
may be coming in the future but fpga have their limits compared to mainstream
gpus as they sacrifice performance for
customizability we may also see other games from the mid90s get ported over to
the fury GPU but can you actually get your hands on a fury GPU and play games
on it I'm sure you're asking Barry made it clear that this is mostly a passion
project and that he doesn't have plans to produce the fury GPU for sale
especially as it's a continual work in progress that's currently being operated
in a full development environment so it's not like you can just slot it into
your Windows PC install the drivers and have everything work flawlessly still
it's a super cool Testament to what you can accomplish 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 CPUs and gpus are different comment
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