Ingenious GPU built from off-the-shelf parts is an incredible feat

A modder and programmer has made his own homemade graphics card using off-the-shelf parts, then went one step further and made a 3D graphics engine for it.

Modern game development is complex, devouring millions of dollars and thousands of man-hours to create intricate software and the hardware it runs on. One self-taught developer and programmer decided to get back to basics and so built his own graphics card entirely from scratch.

Alex Fish posted a video on YouTube that shows off his hand-built creation. It’s a GPU built using basic off-the-shelf parts, along with an AMOLED 1.91-inch screen and SparkFun analog sticks to display and control the output generated by the tiny GPU.

Even considering this remarkable achievement, Alex Fish was not done. His interest was more towards the software development side. So to use the custom-made GPU, Fish developed his own 3D graphics engine to go along with it.

The engine – dubbed the ESPescado engine – was also created entirely from scratch, mostly using C++ and OpenGL.

Remarkably, the 3D engine uses sophisticated techniques such as perspective projection matrix and perspective division. This allows 3D objects to be seen on a 2D screen, as well as polygon meshes that form the basics of both objects and terrain in 3D video games.

The YouTube video shows Fish demonstrating the capabilities of his diminutive development kit. In it, the video shows a triangular object on a black background being displayed on the tiny 1.91-inch screen, and using the two connected joysticks, he can move the object around.

Though not exactly mindblowing by the standards of modern graphics, it is nonetheless an amazing achievement and proves that 3D graphics can run entirely on homemade hardware and software. For those interested, Fish has made the files for the 3D engine and the hardware available on GitHub.