idspispopd wrote:

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.

There is also the quirky mipmapping and strange attempt/claim at emulating per pixel mipmapping, and a subpixel accuracy problem that causes visible texture seams.

Interestingly it supports palletized textures. I think there is some kind of real time conversion in the driver for this. I don't know how well it works. But the next chip NV supported this with was GeForce.

It seems that there are some conflicting opinions out there about the VGA signal quality of this card. People in forums and also some reviews from the time complained about poor signal quality which really put me off at first. But then I saw Phil's video review of the card where he mentioned that the signal quality was excellent.

So I got one of these cards (a Diamond Viper V330) and the image is really sharp on my LCD at 60 and 75 Hz, 1280x1024, 16-bit. Maybe people used to run the card on a CRT at much higher refresh rates of 85 or 100 Hz where blurriness occurs. I have some older cards from S3 and Trident that have this problem, but not with this card so far. I have attached a little screen photo of the Windows desktop so you can judge the quality for yourself.

Very rarely, I noticed a slight blurriness that seems to randomly occur when resolutions are switched back and forth (after exiting a game and returning to desktop), in these cases, it helps to press the auto-adjust button of the LCD to make it return to normal. If you have a blurry LCD signal, try this first.

Also, be sure to install the latest drivers for this card (found here). I don't recommend the older vendor drivers from Diamond for this card because a lot of games don't run at all (Quake 3) or have flickering or glitchy graphics (Need for Speed).

About the card itself, I am loving it so far. Reviews mentioned the rendering quirks and grainy graphics, but that made it all the more interesting to me. Testing games was a lot of fun because you never know what you're going to get. One annoyance is that some games are way too dark (GLQuake and Thief 2), I'd consider these unplayable unless there's a fix for it.

Trevize wrote on 2015-08-18, 11:39:

Did anybody play Ignition (Wikipedia) back then? 😀

Of course - cool game. We also played it on LAN where the only downside was that it loved to "crash".

No issues with the output quality here either but I'm also using the Diamond Viper V330 instance of the Riva 128, so perhaps the Diamond quality is in the mix. And yes I also like the raw, grainy, colourful 3D image - I prefer it over the muddy output I've experienced with the 3Dfx cards of that era.

The speed and compatibility for DOS gaming is well known but I've noticed some issues with it lately - Micro Machines doesn't work, nor does Grand Prix 2 which surprised me. Glitches all over the place.

asdf53 wrote on 2022-07-27, 07:48:

It seems that there are some conflicting opinions out there about the VGA signal quality of this card.

Chip != card.

Just as with S3, and unlike say 3dfx (at least from V3 onward) and ATi who made their own cards, the early nVidia-based cards were made by a multitude of different card vendors. Some paid a lot of attention to analog components. Others didn't. The latter are responsible for some of the poor reputations of such cards. Diamond was at the other end, with excellent quality on most if not all cards. So no surprise you have good experiences with the V330. Other cards with the same chip may give very different experiences.

dionb wrote on 2022-07-27, 11:12:

asdf53 wrote on 2022-07-27, 07:48:

It seems that there are some conflicting opinions out there about the VGA signal quality of this card.

Chip != card.

Just as with S3, and unlike say 3dfx (at least from V3 onward) and ATi who made their own cards, the early nVidia-based cards were made by a multitude of different card vendors. Some paid a lot of attention to analog components. Others didn't. The latter are responsible for some of the poor reputations of such cards. Diamond was at the other end, with excellent quality on most if not all cards. So no surprise you have good experiences with the V330. Other cards with the same chip may give very different experiences.

That's definitely true. But with the Riva 128 it was my impression that it's being universally dismissed as having bad output quality, no matter which vendor. Because the boards all look very similar I assumed that it has to be a general issue. Maybe it's just OEM cards? Would be interesting to hear from someone who has such a card with bad output quality. It could also be that people were confusing rendering quality with signal quality.

asdf53 wrote:

The graininess offsets the softer look of 3D accelerated graphics,

Mipmap noise can be easily can be replicated on Riva TNT with tweakers. But very rough texture filtering can't be replicated, yes.

But with the Riva 128 it was my impression that it's being universally dismissed as having bad output quality,

Which is true, because RAMDAC was still too weak for nice and crispy output on high refresh rates.