RIVA 128

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. 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.