nVidia's 1997 killer GPU : Riva128 with the Diamond Viper 

With Riva128 Nvidia really struck gold in the market back then. The hardware was speed-first approach and with the excellent software support it gained a lot of sales in both retail and OEM channels. I remember Nvidia was very quick to release full OpenGL ICD driver (not the miniGL hack from 3Dfx) and it worked in Quake 2 flawlessly. Matrox, for example, had to rely on a flimsy Direct3D wrapper for quite a time, before their ICD was ready. The rendering quality was sub-par compared to most of the competition, but the SKU offerings with this GPU were very affordable and the thing just worked. Riva128 was the first proper single-chip 2D/3D accelerator with stable driver support for D3D and OGL and the OEMs particularly loved Nvidia for that.

I bought the Diamond Viper back then for 350 german DM. I saved months for it... great gpu and next upgrade was a AMD K6-2 300. Back in the time there was also the Hercules card with PowerVr chip, which i also owned, was a very interesting card!

I had this card back in the day. It was my first Nvidia card and my second gfx card. What i found fascinating about this card was that the pci version i had could take advantage of games that used AGP textures like G-Police. Watching those full motion videos playing in the video walls as i flew above them was jaw dropping for me at the time.

Great video. From this testing I gather that the AGP standard benefits the low end much more than the high end, as it's principal advantage as sharing system and video memory. I have never seen a head to head comparison like this one. My first and only Diamond Multimedia Card was the orginal Viper with an Oak technoolgy chip. It cost $350 in a VLB configuration and only worked about half the time, due to Diamond's poor driver support. It's hard to imagine a time when an Oak VLB card was the fastest on the market, but it was then.

Remember this card, had it back in 1998 in my Pentium MMX @250MHz with Voodoo1.

Nah, filming the screen in 3DM99 in the old-school way is actually way cooler. :)

Awesome video!!! Greetings from Argentina!

If I’m not mistaken, the older Nvidia cards used to take a lot of shortcuts when processing graphics which made them so much faster. If I recall correctly, the ATI cards were more concerned with image quality, hence the poorer performance. I remember that switching from 16- to 32-bit color used to _tank_ performance, even on the fastest GPUs in the late 90’s

When i had the riva128 i remember that some games got texture artifacts unless i set the pci texture memory in the forceware driver over a certain amount. It used that memory to store textures even on the pci version.

Never had one of these. Went from an S3 Virge to a RivaTNT. My experience with the Riva128 was exclusively in the form of Windows games with a checkbox labelled stuff like "fix polygon gaps on Riva128."

I had one , putting an heatsink and fan allowed near to double the freq, thanks for your video.

Hello! 0:31 - I've a similar model named ELSA Victory, same layout and chipset very interesting. I can upload pictures, and also donate the card to you. Thank you 4 the care of those jewels of time! Subscribed in a flash!

Nice! Thats the kind of review the good old Riva128 deserved. The only thing that got me wondering : Why didn't you use the official drivers from Diamond? Anyways, I'm glad/honored I could help out ;) Hopefully the Siemens C5 will one day show up in one of your videos again for a more detailed test aswell :) Keep up the good work!

those compaq cases were of my fav.... have 2 and love them to bits! only down side is I didn't keep the boards for either, modded it to a generic case pretty much

Thank you sharing. I just subbed and look forward to seeing your past and future vids 👍

damn you should have so much more views / subs. nice video as always

I had Diamond Viper 330 PCI back in the day, it was a great alternative to Diamond Monster 3D offering good performance and much better visual quality (those crisp textures with perspective correction!). I still keep several Rivas 128s for my future builds :)

Very interesting, thanks fo the comparison PCI vs AGP.

I still have the 8mb pci version. I use it with an AMD K6-3 @550mhz. It's great for light 3d games from 1996 to 1997, don't expect it to smoothly run games like Unreal, Quake 3 or anything realeased after 2000

Hey great video that was My first agp card! It was fast like a voodoo1 with 2d support but i was having quality image problems with many games with initial drivers,i think many of that problems got fixed with the next architecture the TNT.

This was a fun era in computing. Each generation got significantly better. Very little innovation or motivation to invest in modern parts. Something about CRT's as well. Everything looked great, saturated colors, interpolated by phosphors, even 512x384 looked great in the original unreal engine.

I don't know what's up with nvidia's drivers but I think there's something wrong with the drivers available online. My agp STB Riva 128 (sold with some dell computer) performed much better when I used the drivers that came with it (I got a 3Dmark score of 1500-ish) and I remember that the race looked different too. When I installed nvidia's drivers, the score tanked and the looks of the race changed.

Totally under rated channel since the first retro video. Computer in the gift box from germany is an fujitsu siemens scenic 300?

my first nvidia card were riva 128zx from asus

I remember having one of those man did that chip get hot. Yet they figure it didn't need a heat sink

I have RIVA 128 ZX the oldest Nvidia AGP card in my collection. Someday i will find aproprirate PC to use it.

Need for Speed III is a very well optimized game. It's quite playable even in software mode lowest settings on a P233mmx, and with a Voodoo 1 on the same machine at 640x480 runs at around 20-30fps most of the time with a mixture of low, medium, and high settings and imo still looks pretty respectable.

Years ago I'm used ELSA Winner 1000/R3D (which was Riva 128 AGP) with Celeron 333 and worked great for me at that time, even Shadow Man was playable along with Tomb Raider II at some higher resolutions.

I never had a chance to try out a Riva 128, first Nvidia card I had was a TNT2 Ultra which was pretty capable for its time

I have one with TV out. It is a shame most of the capabilities of these early cards were not fully realized. In the modern era AMD would not host a Nvidia chip.

Great video as allways !

FSC Pro Desktops! yeah! switch on/off via keyboard !

im using a Riva TNT PCI in my Pentium II 400 PC

It's not hard to see why the Riva 128 was a success. Voodoo 1 like performance with 2D support, and widely available in prebuilts? Yeah

I remember around this time, that switching between GPU's (even of the same manufacturer) meant you had to rip out the drivers, (fully, using something similar to DDU, or manually deleting files etc) before installing new ones... was especially needed for a manufacturer switch ATI nVidia..... Had issues very similar to what you experienced here with performance otherwise...

NFS III will actually do cockpit view on 3dfx cards but the lack thereof does seem to be a theme among slightly earlier games, ex: Descent II and NFS II. However NFS III, IV, and V do it right on 3dfx.

I was having Riva 128 ZX 8 MB of vram in 2000 :D

My first "gaming" videocard. AGP lol

I have issues with PCI video cards not working on some mb's but then working on others. (Socket 7 and Socket 3). Very frustrating. Thanks for the video.

I had a time when I was playing on one of these cards and I also had various results in performance. when I had my friends over we played Half-Life multiplayer and it only worked for 30 minutes at a time before the performance dived into unplayable and then we had to restart the game to gain it back for another match. It could also been the fact this was running on a Pentium Pro with 128mb Edo as well . I still have the card so maybe I should take it out sometime and try it out again on a better machine

Funny thing is that you plugged in pci version of the card and Everest says AGP x1 ;) I wouldn't torture '97 chip with '99 software as 3D evolve rapidly in late 90s. Better to try something period correct like. Quake 2, Tomb Raider, Mechwarrior2, Quake1, Flight Unlimited, Croc legend of the gobbos, Final Reality benchmark and so on. I love early 3D this is why I subscribed to your channel. I own all cards shown pci, agp and higher model ZX, also very interesting and the fastest is Canopus Riva128. I have one card like this. Has unique feature like TV-out. So imagine playing big screen Quake 2 in 1997 on single card. Just unbelievable. Also Canopus core clock slightly higher than competition. Ps: 3dmark99 is coded for newer GPU's like riva tnt. Also riva 128 has some overclocking capabilities

I wonder if some models of riva 128 had no bios / it being integrated on later models? Had quite the struggle with mine and had to source a pin compatible eprom since the previous owner had removed the prom (who even does that?)

Nice

Back at that period I had the S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP, but the catch was it lacked 3D acceleration completely. Quake2 and NFS3 played fine on software rendering though.

I don't think I've ever heard ANYONE pronounce it that way. The Spanish, French and Italian pronunciations is "Ree va". Like how you say "Viva". Set my teeth on edge every time you said it.

I had this card when I was growing up. It was half the cost of a Voodoo card. It ran FS98 about 20 FPS. 🤷🏽‍♂️🤣

I am wondering if 3dm99 is just too new for that card and therefor makes use of features that the 128 does not properly support. I also have a small request, and that is to compare the i740 to the i810 in as close of an apples to apples that could be managed. Same cpu for example like a celeron 400. And on the first 810 chipset, not the 810e or 815. The i740 would need to be on an LX chipset of some sort.

this reminds me of Half Life 1, having to get that sweet spot for DirectX or openGL, or just software

I had this card :)

Did you use the latest NVIDIA Reference detonator drivers 3.37 for the Riva128?

a computer does not need a cpu/gpu/fpga, just a program/memory unit, assuming you have all calculation results in fast L2-cache rom, yes, it will take teras, but no matter

Back in the days, im remember when i sold theses riva cards, they are very buggy : low frame rate, artifacts, non runing game and not cheap at all..

Why the heck are you trying to benchmark a RIVA128 at 800x600? Did you even disable anti aliasing? This is one of the earliest 3D cards, everyone was running 640x480 or less back then.

Not riva as in river but riva as in REEVA like in READ, SEED, NEED, BEAD or BLEED.

i wonder if runing glitching games over opengl glide wrapper would improve any resoults

Would this work better in my P1 MMX with my Voodoo1, or in my P2 MMX with 2XVoodoo2's in SLI?

Could you have used nGlide to help with some of the games that were glitching?

Fraps is limiting framerate. You should get an improvement without it running on the quake benchmarks.