Released in late 1997 by
Nvidia, the
RIVA 128, or "NV3", was one of the first consumer
graphics processing units 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.
Following the less successful "NV1" accelerator, RIVA 128 was the first product to gain Nvidia widespread recognition. It was also a major change in technological direction for Nvidia.
Architecture
Nvidia's "NV1" chip had been designed for a fundamentally different type of rendering technology, called quadratic texture mapping, a technique not supported by
Direct3D. The RIVA 128 was instead designed to accelerate Direct3D to the utmost extent possible. It was built to render within the Direct3D 5 and OpenGL
API specifications. The graphics accelerator consists of 3.5 million
transistors built on a 350
nm fabrication process and is clocked at 100
MHz. 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.
RIVA 128 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. The next major chip from Nvidia would be the RIVA TNT.
Image Quality
on RIVA 128 (final drivers)]]
At the time of RIVA 128's release,
3Dfx Voodoo Graphics had firmly established itself as the 3D hardware benchmark against which all newcomers were compared. Voodoo was the first 3D game accelerator to offer exceptional performance and quality in emerging PC 3D gaming. RIVA 128 was scorned for its lower quality rendering (compared to Voodoo) and rendering errors.
With initial drivers, RIVA 128 used per-polygon mipmapping instead of the much higher quality, but more demanding, per-pixel variety. This caused the different texture detail levels to "pop" into place as the player moved through a game and approached each polygon, instead of allowing a seamless, gradual per-pixel transition. Nvidia eventually released drivers which allowed a per-pixel mode. Another issue with the card's texturing was its use of automated mipmap generation. While this improves visual quality and performance in games without mipmaps, it also caused unforeseen problems because it forced games to render in a way that they were not programmed for.
NV3's bilinear filtering was actually "sharper" than that of 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics. But, while it didn't blur textures as much as Voodoo, it did instead add some light noise to textures, because of a lower-fidelity filtering algorithm. There were also problems with noticeable seams between polygons.
While initial drivers did present these image quality problems, later drivers offered image quality arguably matching that of Voodoo Graphics. In addition, because RIVA 128 can render at resolutions higher than 640x480, the card can offer quality superior to that of Voodoo Graphics, as shown in the above Quake II screenshot. The final drivers released for RIVA 128 support per-pixel mipmapping, full-scene anti-aliasing (super-sampling), and a number of options to fine-tune features in order to optimize quality and performance.
Drivers and APIs
Drivers were, for a significant portion of the card's life, rather rough. Not only were the aforementioned Direct3D issues apparent, but the card lacked good OpenGL support.
With RIVA 128, Nvidia began their quest for top-quality OpenGL support, eventually resulting in the board being a capable OpenGL performer. One major disadvantage for Nvidia was that many games during RIVA 128's lifetime used 3Dfx's proprietary
Glide API. Legally, only 3Dfx cards could use 3Dfx's Glide API.
Like the competing ATI Rage Pro, RIVA 128 was never able to accelerate the popular Unreal Engine in Direct3D mode due to missing hardware features. It was, however, possible to use the engine's OpenGL renderer, but unfortunately OpenGL support was quite slow and buggy in the original Unreal Engine. Performance in Quake III Arena, a game using an engine more advanced than Unreal Engine 1, was better due to the engine having been designed for OpenGL.
Nvidia's final RIVA 128 drivers for Windows 9x include a full OpenGL driver. However, for this driver to function, Windows must be set with a desktop color depth of 16-bit.
A driver for RIVA 128 is also included in Windows 2000 and XP, but lacks 3D support. A beta driver with OpenGL support was once leaked by Nvidia but was canceled later, and there is no Windows 2000 driver for RIVA 128 on Nvidia's driver site today. Neither the beta driver nor the ones come with Windows 2000/XP could support Direct3D.
Performance
At the time, RIVA 128 was one of the first combination 2D/3D cards that could rival Voodoo Graphics. RIVA 128's 2D capability was seen as impressive for its time and was competitive with even high-end 2D-only graphics cards in both quality and performance.
Competing chipsets
Matrox m3D, Mystique 220
3Dfx Voodoo Graphics, Voodoo²
ATI Rage series (Pro was the most recent at the time)
S3 ViRGE, Savage 3D
Rendition Vérité V1000 & V2x00
PowerVR Series 1
See also
Comparison of Nvidia graphics processing units
References
External links
Nvidia's RIVA 128 FAQ
Category:1997 introductions
Category:Nvidia
Category:Video cards
