Riva128
NVIDIA was founded in January 1993. The company has chosen to focus on the development of high-performance graphics chips used in consumer video cards. Riva 128 can definitely be called the first graphics chip. This chip was released in 1997. It carried both a fast 2D core and a fairly productive 3D one. That is why video cards based on the Riva128 chip were preferred over all other 2D/3D accelerators. Why did nVidia produce a 2D/3D chip and not just a 3D one? You can answer this question if you remember that time. The market was flooded with 3dfx Voodoo accelerators that were pretty well promoted. And not a single 3D accelerator could compete with them. It was possible to win only by presenting users with "all in one" - a 2D / 3D video card that can play MPEG, does not require an additional PCI slot, is quite fast and, of course, new. All these qualities were possessed by the "dark horse" nVidia - Riva128. Riva128 supported up to 4 MB of SGRAM memory, AGP / PCI - interface, the ability to store textures in system memory, rendering in a window, and much more.
Characteristics of Riva 128
| Name | Riva 128 |
| Core | NV3 |
| Process technology (µm) | 0.35 |
| Transistors (million) | 3.5 |
| Core frequency | 100 |
| Memory frequency (DDR) | 100 |
| Bus and memory type | SDR-128bit |
| Bandwidth (Gb/s) | 1.6 |
| Pixel pipelines | 1 |
| TMU per conveyor | 1 |
| textures per clock | 1 |
| textures per pass | 1 |
| Vertex conveyors | No |
| Pixel Shaders | No |
| Vertex Shaders | No |
| Fill Rate (Mpix/s) | 100 |
| Fill Rate (Mtex/s) | 100 |
| DirectX | 5.0 |
| Anti-Aliasing (Max) | No (?) |
| Anisotropic Filtering (Max) | No (?) |
| Memory | 4MB |
| Interface | AGP2x/PCI |
| RAMDAC | 206MHz |
In 1997, not every card could boast of such characteristics. And cards based on Riva128 could. 230MHz RAMDAC allowed to work at a resolution of 1600x1200 with a frequency of 75Hz. A 100 MHz SGRAM memory provided a pretty decent speed at high resolutions. Thus, the market for home and office video cards could well belong to cards based on nVidia Riva 128. Large resolutions and fast 2D. What else do you need for office applications? Another thing is games. Here it was necessary to reveal all the advantages of the video card. 128-bit graphics pipeline, 128-bit video memory access, high fill and processing speed, built-in floating point pipeline, support for the new AGP bus. And video cards based on Riva 128 managed to unleash their power in games. Video cards based on Riva 128 worked especially well on systems with Pentium II processors. Here they showed unsurpassed speed.
Cards based on Riva 128, due to their characteristics, had high speed performance. Due to the 128-bit chip architecture, the speed in 2D was much higher than that of competitors. And this is quite understandable, because in 1997 few people could boast of a 128-bit memory bus and 100 MHz SGRAM. The video was also played at the proper level. The speed in 3D. Well, which of the competitors could say that his card has a memory bandwidth of 1.6 gigabytes per second? And who could submit a map to the AGP? Which competitor had a Fillrate of 100 MPixels/sec and a peak throughput of 4 MPolys/sec? That's right - no one. Another thing is that Riva 128 was very dependent on the processor and showed the best results on Pentium II processors. And this despite the fact that the Riva 128 had a built-in 5 GFLOPS floating point processing pipeline! Now it makes no sense to give the results of the tests in 1997. Compared to today, they would look just ridiculous. But we can safely say that Riva 128 completely overtook its main competitor - 3dfx Voodoo Graphics in speed and did not allow Voodoo2 owners to live in peace.
Drivers were a sore point for all video cards based on Riva 128. This scared off ordinary users who just wanted to play and not bother with long discussions in conferences and endless digging in the registry. Strange as it may seem now, nVidia did not release reference drivers for the Riva 128. What does this mean? This means that if you had a Diamond Viper 330 video card, then only Diamond drivers could be installed on it. And iron manufacturers were not in a hurry to release new drivers. In general, Viper 330 video cards were considered one of the most "unconfigurable" in the world. But many users found a way out of this situation. Due to the fact that most of the boards were made on the basis of the reference ones, had a flash BIOS and differed only in inscriptions, it was possible to "resettle the soul" of the card. This is the name given by one of the users in the conference. The transmigration of the soul is not witchcraft or alchemy. You just had to download the BIOS for another video card (for example, Asus 3D Explorer) from the Internet and install it. If the operation is successful, your graphics card will turn into Asus 3D Explorer v3000. And no test can prove otherwise. The same green board, the same Diamond inscription, only it's Asus. Now it’s clear why flashing the BIOS was called the transmigration of souls. The old "soul" could be saved to a floppy disk so that it could be flashed back before the upgrade and avoid unnecessary explanations with computer store technicians. Like real magic, the BIOS flashing operation was not safe. Sometimes video cards had to be restored for hours, remembering all manufacturers with kind words.
Compatibility. Video cards based on Riva 128 supported one of the first versions of Direct3D, which was included in the distribution of DirectX 5.0, as well as OpenGL. As for the quality. The quality was top notch. In some respects, it was better than Voodoo, but there were still errors. One of the most important is the inconsistency of textures. Now this is already difficult to see, but in 1997 it was a fairly common problem. Stripes, cracks and other artifacts formed between the textures, which spoiled the image quality. What was good was that a 3D game could be run at a resolution higher than 640x480, which could not be done on almost all Voodoo boards. Of OpenGL games at that time, there were only games based on Quake and Quake 2 engines. In these games it was possible to make Riva 128 cards work as well. But again, everything depended on the drivers. Compatibility with the two APIs was not claimed. At that time, most games ran through Glide, and games that supported Direct3D could be counted on the fingers. This also had a negative impact on the purchasing power of Riva 128.