Legendary video game developer John Carmack, known for his work on Doom and Quake, discusses the concept of a video card as a standalone device.
In X Twitter, Carmack nostalgically recalls the 1990s 3dfx Voodoo2 video cards. He enthusiastically talks about their ability to connect in “chains” of two or more devices with minimal latency.
“Voodoo2 SLI GPU chains were awesome – just connect two cards with a ribbon cable, and you double the [processing] speed of pixels. No special professional versions needed, so two friends could open up their PCs and connect their video cards together for double the speed, and you could really upgrade [the system] instead of just replacing the card.”
John Carmack points out that, unlike the requirements and features of modern systems, Voodoo2 video cards could be combined “nearly an unlimited number of times with minor delay compared to a video frame.” In fact, the cards didn’t need an additional PCI port for expansion — just a power source.
“Play Quake 2 at a resolution of 1280×1024 120Hz with 4xAA in 1998.”
From reminiscing about past technologies, Carmack moves to imagining how graphic accelerators could work. He notes that modern visualization tools wouldn’t be able to take advantage of the chain, but in a looped form, such a scheme would have some advantages. Carmack also speculates about fully autonomous operation, at least in some situations.
“I still think that modern video cards should be able to operate without central processors… Accelerator chains are a legitimate use, but it would just be interesting if GPUs created their own video signal with diagnostic information when you power them outside the host system. You could go further and put a tiny Linux system with busybox running on your command processor to input feedback through the display port if you don’t have a USB port.”
The idea of a standalone computer based on a video card isn’t that far-fetched in 2024. Motherboards have long been able to perform some functions without a processor. There are also attempts to add M.2 SSD storage to video cards. There are also graphics cards with built-in displays. Not to mention artificial intelligence accelerators built on the basis of GPUs.
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