RIVA 128
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| Release date | 1997 |
|---|---|
| Codename | NV3 |
| Cards | |
| High-end | RIVA 128, ZX |
| Rendering support | |
| Direct3D | Direct3D 5.0 |
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.
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. 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. There is 12 KiB of on-chip memory used for pixel and vertex caches. The chip was limited to a 16-bit (Highcolor) pixel format when performing 3D acceleration and a 16-bit Z-buffer.
The 2D accelerator engine within RIVA 128 is 128 bits wide and also operates at 100 MHz. In this "fast and wide" configuration, as Nvidia referred to it, RIVA 128 performed admirably for GUI acceleration compared to competitors. 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 had the advantage of being a combination 2D/3D graphics chip, unlike Voodoo Graphics. This meant that the computer did not require a separate 2D card for output outside of 3D applications. It also allowed 3D rendering within a window. The ability to build a system with just one graphics card, and still have it be feature-complete for the time, made RIVA 128 a lower-cost high-performance solution.
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