I was able to use one of those magma cardbus adapters and use a voodoo 2 on a laptop. No ZV port though. Somthing like youre discribing could not exist for a lot of reasons.

Warlord wrote on 2023-08-07, 05:58:

I was able to use one of those magma cardbus adapters and use a voodoo 2 on a laptop. No ZV port though. Somthing like youre discribing could not exist for a lot of reasons.

Why not?
In my understanding ZV allows for direct transfer of video data to the video card. And if a PCMCIA card can decode video and send it to the laptop screen, why can't it render a 3D image? Given there are appropriate drivers.
At the same time there was a 3D capable video card - VtBook, but it could output only to external display. I wonder why. Still there can be principal limitations for that.

If you could do it in an FPGA, then quite possible. The early Voodoo 1/2 driver in Linux could operate like that; rendering via the Voodoo card and then copying back the frame from the Voodoo framebuffer into a window on the (at the time) 2d card. It was pretty neat to have OpenGL in a window, but you wouldn't get the full performance since you were constantly shuffling commands over PCI to the Voodoo, then copying frames back.

I suspect it would be an easier implementation for Windows than Dos, since you would have control over the driver, the embedded Dos 3dfx driver wouldn't have any concept of copying back the frame.