As far as I know NV1 only had limited D3D support because of how it did 3d radically differently from the D3D specification. An NV1 card is nice to have as a collectible but not for a card that you want to use every day because so few games are fully compatible with it.

I don't know about drivers that aren't specific to the Diamond cards. The Diamond cards were the most popular so most drivers are for those. There was a company called Yuan that made an NV1 card and a few others but those cards are even harder to find than the Diamond ones so drivers would be equally rare. Do you actually have a non-Diamond NV1 card?

It doesn't have any D3D support. It's incompatible with D3D due to its quadratic rendering. Diamond was fuzzy on this because they really didn't want to say it couldn't support D3D. There is a lot of old chat on Google Groups (usenet) about this.

The oldest card that NV has reference drivers for is the Riva 128. The NV1 was almost a Diamond exclusive. I don't know of any other cards that used the chip.

i don't actually have a non-Diamond NV1 card, but i wonder if there was any drivers from nvidia, would it be newer than the one from diamond?

as fast as i know, some nv1 card are also made by videoforte, leadtek, yuan(palit), aztec.

Diamond wasn't very good with keeping their drivers up to date. They usually did the minimum. So I wouldn't be surprised if there were newer drivers. But I'm not sure that there would be any benefit. The games are all written for the NV1 API so it's not like updating your drivers for a card that uses D3D/OpenGL where there is always bug fixing to do.

Bah! Who needs D3D?

"Direct-3D IM is a horribly broken API. It inflicts great pain and suffering on the programmers using it, without returning any significant advantages. I don't think there is ANY market segment that D3D is appropriate for, OpenGL seems to work just fine for everything from quake to softimage. There is no good technical reason for the existence of D3D." – John Carmack, 1996.

😁