NVIDIA
Contents
NV1 / STG2000
NVIDIA's first 3D accelerator was an all-in-one product with audio, GUI, VGA, 3D and Sega Saturn gamepad support. It uses a type of 3D rendering called quadratic texture mapping that is not Direct3D or OpenGL compatible so it is only useful with games that use its proprietary API. Its audio consists of wavetable MIDI and Directsound support but very little DOS support. DOS VGA compatibility is limited.
It comes in various memory configurations with 4MB maximum.
NV3 / RIVA 128
This chip is a 2D+3D GPU. It is essentially designed for Direct3D 5 but ok for OpenGL games too. It has some rendering quality issues like visible texture seams and a very apparent dithering pattern. It can only render at 16-bit color depth. It supports resolutions up to 960x720. Performance is competitive with Voodoo Graphics (Voodoo1).
RIVA 128 ZX is an upgraded chip that came later and supports 8MB RAM.
NV4 / RIVA TNT
TNT is a drastically improved Direct3D 6-based GPU with much better image quality and performance. It is competitive with Voodoo2 but with more flexibility such as 32-bit color and larger texture support. 32-bit color imparts a significant speed loss though. 16MB RAM allows for very high resolutions. Great OpenGL support.
NV5 & NV6 / RIVA TNT2
Very similar to the original TNT but it typically has 32MB of RAM and it is clocked much higher so performs noticeably better. Some popular budget variants include Vanta and TNT2 M64.
