Clem from element14 was tasked with exploring the possibility of turning a Raspberry Pi Pico into a GPU capable of rendering super-smooth graphics in-game. Yes, you read that correctly — he’s not attempting it with our monster new Raspberry Pi 5, or even a 4; he’s giving our teeny tiny little Pico a shot.

Gamers are serious about GPUs: they can spend thousands of pounds on them. Now, I’m not a big gamer, so I didn’t quite believe that, but a three-second search for most expensive GPU threw up this statement: “the Nvidia A100 graphics card goes for upwards of $30,000.” What?! Well, I’m perfectly happy with my jerky Rollercoaster Tycoon visuals, but I love that the rest of you want better for yourselves.

So, can a Pico do it?

Rather than reinvent the wheel, Clem drew on the PicoDVI project by our very own Luke Wren. This takes advantage of Pico’s PIO to bit bang DVI signals.

A previous project had seen Clem manage to get Linux running on a little ESP42 board he had designed himself. That board had a spot for one of our RP2040 chips; Clem didn’t ultimately use RP2040 in that project, but this new quest to turn a Pico into a GPU meant it was time for it to shine. Clem prototyped for this project with a Raspberry Pi Pico and a few wires, just to see if it was even possible, before spending time reworking his ESP32 board.

Long story short, after flashing some example graphics libraries onto his Raspberry Pi Pico and tinkering with Arduino’s IDE, Clem was satisfied that his Pico prototype operated just like a plug-and-play video game graphics card. This summary doesn’t do justice to Clem’s determination in working through a series of setbacks during prototyping, so make sure to watch the project video if you’d like to learn more about the build process and suffer vicariously in solidarity with this valiant maker.

Final product in the works

While he didn’t get his reworked ESP32 board completed in time for this project video, Clem has gone ahead with bringing his vision to life. He hopes to see it bring in a new, more affordable, future for gamers looking to harness microcontrollers for their graphics processing power.