First post, by snorg
So I've seen a ton of home brew pc projects on the web and that got me to wondering, how hard would it be to do a homebrew 3d accelerator? My guess is it would be pretty difficult.
I'm assuming you would need to break it up across several boards, I don't know that it would be practical to put on one board. And I'm not even sure how exactly you would implement the GPU. 7400 series logic is probably impractical because it would take way too much space, so you'd probably need an FPGA or something.
It would probably not make sense to do with anything less than a 386 level system. I don't know that the ISA bus would have enough bandwidth, so you might need to look at something with EISA or possibly even an early gen PCI Pentium era system? It could be this is just too complex a project for the type of homebrew computer commonly built (8 or 16 bit class systems) and for a system that could properly drive the 3d board, it would be too difficult for a hobbyist to build the actual computer (building a first gen Pentium or high end 486 from the ground up, so to speak). So while this is an interesting idea it is probably in the realm of fantasy. Although if I'm wrong, I'd love to hear your thoughts.
