VOGONS


History of nVIDIA Graphics cards Vol. 1

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Reply 44 of 90, by yjfy

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3.3 STB
STB believes that future growth was dependant upon the successful introduction of a new generation of multimedia accelerators.STB is the first to cooperate with nVIDIA, obtain the latest RIVA 128 graphics engine produced, and develop Velocity 128 graphics card.

In June 1997, STB began extensive testing of the Velocity 128. STB results of performance tests conducted on the Velocity 128 which proved that the nVIDIA RIVA128 graphics engine was defective and was causing PC's in which it was installed to crash.

VELOCITY 128

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Reply 54 of 90, by yjfy

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4. NV4

July 31, 1998 nVIDIA's RIVA TNT 3D PROCESSOR

Riva TNT defeated the incredible 3Dfx Voodoo 2 and became the fastest graphics card of the year, and nVIDIA also noticed the importance of excellent drivers to give full play to the performance of the graphics chip, and wrote a new driver for RIVA TNT and named it As "Detonator"

TNT is the abbreviation of Twin Texel. The core architecture is a rendering system with two 32-bit pixel pipelines, each pixel pipeline has 1 TMU, and two textures are processed in parallel in each clock cycle. In this way, the maximum fill rate of RivaTNT working at 90MHz can reach 180M Texels/sec. At the same time, Riva TNT also has a 24-bit Z buffer (Z-Buffer) and an 8-bit stencil buffer for the first time.
TNT's design goal was to achieve twice the performance of Voodoo2, but because the 0.25 micron process was not perfect at the time, nVIDIA had to use a 0.35 micron process, making RivaTNT only work at 90MHz.

4.1 nVIDIA

4.1.1 Chip Evaluation board

(From anandtech.com)

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Reply 55 of 90, by yjfy

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4.1.2 Product Evaluation board
nVIDIA's Product Evaluation board is the later public version or reference board, and many manufacturers' graphics cards use this layout more or less.

(From PC Mag December 1, 1998)

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Reply 56 of 90, by yjfy

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4.2 Diamond
The NV3 graphics card project finally succeeded, and the Voodoo card supported by Diamond was also successful. Diamond was unable to tilt the NV4 graphics card project. There are only four types of Viper V550 graphics cards.
4.2.1 Viper V550 VIVO AGP/PCI
Although the two versions of Viper V550 graphics cards are VIVO versions, in fact very few have VIVO, most of them are TV-OUT Viper V550 graphics cards.
4.2.1.1 ES
This is the official promotional image of Diamond, which was later printed on the box.

(From assets.hardwarezone.com)

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Reply 58 of 90, by yjfy

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4.2.1.3 AGP
The most common is the TV-out version, and the VIVO version is very rare.

(From Amibay.com)

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Reply 59 of 90, by yjfy

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4.2.2 Viper V550 NLX AGP
4.2.2.1 QS
This is the official promotional image of Diamond, which was later printed on the box. Like the official product, it is QS.

(From home.datacomm.ch)

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