The RIVA 128, or "NV3", was a consumer graphics processing unit created in 1997 by Nvidia. It was the first Nvidia product to integrate 3D acceleration in addition to traditional 2D and video acceleration. Its name is an acronym for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator.
The RIVA 128 followed Nvidia's less successful "NV1" accelerator and was the first product to gain Nvidia widespread recognition. It was also a major change in Nvidia's technological direction.
thumbnail|Diamond Viper V330 4Mb @ RIVA 128 GPU
thumb|An ASUS RIVA 128ZX AGP
History
By 1996, Nvidia was in poor shape financially. It had initially pursued a completely different type of rendering technology called quadratic texture mapping with its first product, the NV1. Then the company had spent a year trying to use its inferior technology to build the graphics chip for Sega's Dreamcast video game console. Sega finally had to pull the plug on Nvidia's project and switch vendors, but was convinced to keep Nvidia alive with a $5 million investment.
The graphics accelerator consists of 3.5 million transistors built on SGS-Thomson's 5LM 350 nm fabrication process and is clocked at 100 MHz. RIVA 128 has a single pixel pipeline capable of 1 pixel per clock when sampling one texture. It is specified to output pixels at a rate of 100 million per second and 25-pixel triangles at 1.5 million per second. A 32-bit hardware VESA-compliant SVGA/VGA core was implemented as well. Video acceleration aboard the chip is optimized for MPEG-2 but lacks full acceleration of that standard. Final picture output is routed through an integrated 206 MHz RAMDAC.
In early 1998, Nvidia released a refreshed version called the RIVA 128 ZX. This refreshed design of NV3 increased memory support to 8 MiB and increased RAMDAC frequency to 250 MHz. These additions allowed the RIVA 128 ZX to support higher resolutions and refresh rates. The ZX version was fabricated by SGS-Thomson and TSMC, and uses an 8MB SGRAM memory chip, clocked at 125MHz, from Samsung Electronics.
The RIVA 128 had an AGP 1X bus interface, whereas the ZX version of it was one of the early AGP 2X parts, giving it some more marketing headroom by being on the forefront of interface technology. The graphics processor was built around Intel's AGP specification targeting the Intel 440LX chipset for the Pentium II. Nvidia designed the RIVA 128 with a maximum memory capacity of 4 MiB because, at the time, this was the cost-optimal approach for a consumer 3D accelerator. This was the case partly because of the chip's capability to store textures in off-screen system RAM in both PCI or AGP configurations.
Image quality
thumb|[[Quake II on RIVA 128 (final drivers)]]
At the time of the RIVA 128's release, 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics had firmly established itself as the 3D hardware benchmark against which all newcomers were compared. The Voodoo was the first 3D game accelerator to offer exceptional performance and quality. The RIVA 128 was scorned for its lower quality rendering (compared to the Voodoo) and rendering errors.
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! colspan="4" |Fillrate
! colspan="4" |Memory
! rowspan="2"
! colspan="2" |Latest API support
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! style="text-align:left" |Riva 128
|August 25, 1997
| rowspan="2" |NV3
|SGS 350 nm
| rowspan="2" |4
| rowspan="2" |90
|AGP 1x, PCI
| rowspan="2" |100
| rowspan="2" |100
|rowspan="2" |1:1:1
| rowspan="2" |100
| rowspan="2" |100
| rowspan="2" |100
|rowspan="2" |0
|4
| rowspan="2" |1.6
| rowspan="2" |SDR
| rowspan="2" |128
|?
| rowspan="2" |5.0
| rowspan="2" |1.0
|-
! style="text-align:left" |Riva 128ZX
|February 23, 1998
|SGS/TSMC 350 nm
| rowspan="1" |AGP 2x, PCI
|8
|?
|}
Competing chipsets
- Matrox Mystique 220
- 3DFX Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo² (3D-only boards)
- ATI Rage series (Pro was the most recent at the time)
- S3 ViRGE, Savage 3D
- Rendition Vérité V1000 & V2x00
- PowerVR PCX2
See also
- Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units
References
External links
- Nvidia's RIVA 128 FAQ