every D3D game of the era will do just fine

The Riva 128 was my first 3D accelerator. One of my favorite gaming experiences was completing FF7 with a Riva 128 on a K6-2 system back in the day.

I bought the Riva (STB brand) at retail, and the game bundle included Interstate '76, Motoracer, and a FIFA game.

Riva 128 is one quirky, ugly, but fast (for 97) GPU.

I guess SepterraCore, Rollcage, and Deathkarz come to mind. Maybe Anachronox, but a 4 MB card probably won't be nearly enough for that. (I used my 12 MB Voodoo2 for that when I first got it.)

GeorgeMan wrote:

The only one I desperately want to try is Final Fantasy VII, which I think it's got a patch for the whole Nvidia Riva series. 😀

If I'm not mistaken, that patch ultimately enables use of the game with all D3D cards. In any case, fanmade fixes for FFVII are now widely available and it is no trouble at all to get it running pretty much anywhere, even if you don't want to buy the new Steam version (which is pretty much just the original version pre-combined with those fanmade fixes, if I'm not mistaken). You may want to consider the patch that enables the use of the original PSX soundtrack, for instance.

Jedi Outcast. 😀

While not really recommended for id tech3 games it CAN work with them. Probably not Call of Duty though but JK2 works. Try to prefer vertex lighting where available so there's no terrible blend precision killing off texture quality

Or, since it's PCI, you can put it into 486, for which Rivas are one of the fastest things around 😀

This might be interesting 😀 http://www.vintage3d.org/riva128.php#sthash.JTlanqKx.dpbs

Thanks for the replies! I thought that you might not "play any game from 1997", as it's DX5 only. 😀

A socket 7 system can emulate a 386 and 486, so I don't think I'm going to hunt a PCI 486.

@RacoonRider I've already read this, but thanks!

It seems that I'll start hunting pretty old 3D games that currently I'm not aware of.

NVidia put a lot of work into Riva 128 drivers. It can run 1999 games like Quake3 and UT (in OpenGL mode). The problem is it has awful image quality because it's not a very robust GPU, which you will discover. 😉

You might enjoy having a Riva TNT to compare with. The leap in image quality is astonishing.

I don't seem to be able to find a proper TNT. All I've ever had was the crippled model 64. Plus all of them were AGP, not PCI, so a no-go for most Pentium MMX systems.

GeorgeMan wrote:

I don't seem to be able to find a proper TNT. All I've ever had was the crippled model 64. Plus all of them were AGP, not PCI, so a no-go for most Pentium MMX systems.

That has been EXACTLY my issue as well!

What I did was look for specific models of TNT2. For example Diamond Viper V770. I got two of them recently by searching directly. Haven't received them yet though.

Tongue-in-cheek: Any game you want to look like crap. <-- insert banned word for crap

Sorry, hard to resist a joke. I just remember the Riva 128 having horrible display quality.

You mean overall display quality or just crappy-3D?

Because my TNT has pretty sharp image in Windows. I'm talking about 800x600 and 1024x768 @ 16bit, nothing fancy. 😀

The latest Diamond drivers for their Riva128 added DX6 capabilities.

GeorgeMan wrote:

You mean overall display quality or just crappy-3D?

Because my TNT has pretty sharp image in Windows. I'm talking about 800x600 and 1024x768 @ 16bit, nothing fancy. 😀

3D is not crappy, but dithering is not too nice, image can be grainy/noisy. A good read is http://www.vintage3d.org/riva128.php (also the gallery).
Riva 128 was the first mainstream PC 3D accelerator which both integrated 2D and exceeded Voodoo1 performance. Compatibility for games of that era should be quite good since it was rather common.

Did anybody play Ignition (Wikipedia) back then? 😀

Trevize wrote:

Did anybody play Ignition (Wikipedia) back then? 😀

Yes, played that game to death!

Just did a quick bench about DOS performance. I used Phil's dos bench. Test machine was a P 166MMX, 64MB SDR and the other candidates were an S3 Vision 968 4MB VRAM (1995) and a Voodoo3 2000 16MB SGRAM (1999).

Well, Riva 128 was the fastest amongst the others. Voodoo3 could only match it in a few tests. S3 was left a little behind. All of them had very good image quality. 😁

Trevize wrote:

Did anybody play Ignition (Wikipedia) back then? 😀

A blast on a LAN but it used to crash quite often. Having a dos- and win.exe out of the box was a nice oddity too.

Trevize wrote:

Did anybody play Ignition (Wikipedia) back then? 😀

Yep... used to play it a lot with my brother on a split screen 🤣