TurtleCard 100X: Young Youtuber builds “cheapest graphics card in the world”
In a multi-part video series on YouTube, a young inventor presents the idea of building the “world’s cheapest graphics card”. This should consist of components worth 30 US dollars, which is reflected accordingly in the performance. In the test, the Youtuber shows what the GPU can do.
When it comes to programming, age does not necessarily matter, as the YouTube channel of a young hobbyist proves. This one is called “TheCodingTurtle” and, according to the video description, specializes in programming games, developing Unity tutorials and creating mods and data packages for Minecraft. For some time now, the young lad has been working on his own graphics card, which is said to be the cheapest in the world and which he christened “TurtleCard 100X” The X suffix stands for “extremely terribly designed”.
What is the world’s cheapest GPU capable of and how does it perform?
The CodingTurtle has been documenting the process from theory to the actual construction of the GPU for a month in a multi-part video series. To give an idea of what his own creation is capable of, he compares the TurtleCard 100X to a Geforce GTX 1060 from Nvidia. The latter comes with a chip clock of 1,506 MHz and 3 GiB VRAM on a 192-bit memory connection, paired with support for a maximum resolution of 4K at 60 Hz. The graphics card from TheCodingTurtle, on the other hand, claims to have the following specifications: 10 MHz chip clock, 32 KiByte VRAM on an 8-bit memory connection and achieves a maximum resolution of 800 x 600 pixels at 60 Hz.
In the latest video so far, the young tinkerer finally tries to construct his “cheapest graphics card in the world”. According to their own statements, the components that TheCodingTurtle procured for its GPU cost around 30 US dollars. The construction can be summed up by the young youtuber building counters for the horizontal timing and adding comparators for the sync pulses as well as a latch and some inverters. TheCodingTurtle repeated the same process for vertical timing.
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This was followed by the test run of the TurtleCard 100X. The creator explains that he can make (colored) lines appear on the screen as soon as he changes the RGB values and associates them with the counters. The lines are broken in some places, but the Youtuber considers the output alone to be a success. In his latest unreleased video in the series, TheCodingTurtle wants to connect his graphics card to a RAM chip to display a photo of a bird on the screen. So it remains exciting.
Source: The Coding Turtle on Youtube
Reference-www.pcgameshardware.de
