Voodoo1 and 2 run the RAM synchronously with the graphics chips so no can't really benefit from faster chips. I'm not sure you can run 8MB on a Voodoo1. I think there may be a hardware limit on framebuffer size. But having more texture memory like the 6MB cards (w/ 4MB texture mem) is definitely a benefit.

Voodoo Graphics is capable of using MiByte of video RAM, there were Quantum 3D cards with such configuration. I am not sure though, whether it was 4+4 or 2+6 MiB for framebuffer and texture memory. My guess would be the latter.

Voodoo Graphics supports up to 4MiB for the framebuffer and up to 4MiB per texture mapping unit with up to 3 TMU's per FBI.

What would the divider have been on the PCI clock when Voodoo1's were around? 1 / 50ns * 1000 = 20MHz, and 1 / 25ns * 1000 = 40MHz. Although, on the Voodoo2 page it says the card had 25ns RAM, possible of running 100MHz, but running at 90MHz. It was my understanding that you would need 10ns RAM to run 100MHz so I am a bit confused as to what is going on, here.

These cards use EDO DRAM and that is rated a bit differently than SDRAM. EDO mode on these chips does have a 10ns cycle time. 25ns is the RAS access time.

Heh. I just found a Usenet post from Gary Tarolli about why they used EDO instead of SDRAM.

we choose EDO because […]
Show full quote

we choose EDO because

Voodoo 1 was EDO
EDO is still cheaper than SDRAM
EDO is actually faster than SDRAM at the same clock

Since we can get EDO to run at 100 Mhz, why bother with SDRAM?
SDRAM has more latency on a page miss than EDO.
There is a common perceptino that SDRAM is superior to EDO. I
believe this is false, they each have their advantages and
disadvantages. For Voodoo2, EDO is the better choice, and it
is fast enough not to be the bottleneck.

[GPUT]Carsten:
Yes, I'm aware of that. There were several cards that used more than the standard 2+2 MB.
Like the Miro Highscore 3D and Canopus Pure 3D , which had 2+4MB or the Skywell Magic 3D Plus and Obsidian 50-4220 which used 4+4MB.
Then of course there's the Quantum3D Obsidian 100SB-4440v which has 2 Voodoo 1 Chips in SLI and 22MB of RAM, but that's a rather special case. 😉

swaaye:
You can basically mod any 4MB Voodoo1 card to 8MB of RAM (thus enabling 800x600 with enabled z-buffer), I was just wondering if there's any benefit in using RAM with better access times and if the Voodoo2 RAM is compatible.

Link to the mod: http://www.falconfly.de/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1366485713

Better access time not only requires capable memory, but also bios that would set the timings. So you might need to modify bios as well, I don't think there are tools to do it conveniently. Even then better timings of video memory usually do not improve performance above margin of error. More benefitial would be higher overclocking headroom, but the chipset does not have much anyway.

Performance gains are certain but timings I am not sure, should work. There is another forum that has the actual results from this mod and it works.