nVidia's 1997 killer GPU : Riva128 with the Diamond Viper

In this video we're going to be taking a look at one of my all time favorite video cards, the Diamond Viper V330 from Diamond Multimedia.
Kindly donated to the channel by Christophe from Germany, I was finally able to test it out on my period correct Compaq Deskpro Pentium II 350MHz
#nvidia #gpu #riva128

[@Ivan-pr7ku]

With Riva128 Nvidia really struck gold in the market back then. The hardware was speed-first approach and with the excellent software support it gained a lot of sales in both retail and OEM channels. I remember Nvidia was very quick to release full OpenGL ICD driver (not the miniGL hack from 3Dfx) and it worked in Quake 2 flawlessly. Matrox, for example, had to rely on a flimsy Direct3D wrapper for quite a time, before their ICD was ready. The rendering quality was sub-par compared to most of the competition, but the SKU offerings with this GPU were very affordable and the thing just worked. Riva128 was the first proper single-chip 2D/3D accelerator with stable driver support for D3D and OGL and the OEMs particularly loved Nvidia for that.

[@mortrek]

I "upgraded" from a Rendition v2200 to a Riva 128. It was at least twice as fast, and looked, at most, half as good. Still, it let me play EverQuest. It served me well until I found a working v550 TNT in a junk bin. I think I used that TNT for years until I switched to a Radeon 7500. Those were the days, where each new generation of card just destroyed the previous ones, and every company struggled to put out even remotely functional drivers.

[@djpirtu2]

Remember this card, had it back in 1998 in my Pentium MMX @250MHz with Voodoo1.

[@RetroSpector78]

The PCI version is an interesting card to have especially on machines that doesn't have an AGP slot. Some of those compact Compaq / Packard Bell type machines with integrated AGP graphics but without an AGP slot would really benefit from a setup like this.

[@kkx8268]

I bought the Diamond Viper back then for 350 german DM. I saved months for it... great gpu and next upgrade was a AMD K6-2 300. Back in the time there was also the Hercules card with PowerVr chip, which i also owned, was a very interesting card!

[@sargonuspa3672]

I had this card back in the day. It was my first Nvidia card and my second gfx card. What i found fascinating about this card was that the pci version i had could take advantage of games that used AGP textures like G-Police. Watching those full motion videos playing in the video walls as i flew above them was jaw dropping for me at the time.

[@dintyshideaway9505]

Great video. From this testing I gather that the AGP standard benefits the low end much more than the high end, as it's principal advantage as sharing system and video memory. I have never seen a head to head comparison like this one. My first and only Diamond Multimedia Card was the orginal Viper with an Oak technoolgy chip. It cost $350 in a VLB configuration and only worked about half the time, due to Diamond's poor driver support. It's hard to imagine a time when an Oak VLB card was the fastest on the market, but it was then.

[@RuruFIN]

Nah, filming the screen in 3DM99 in the old-school way is actually way cooler. :)

[@RetroSpector78]

Makes it a lot easier for me :) doing screen capturing is always a pain, lots of cables / setup needed, always issues with video / audio / sync issues .....

[@RuruFIN]

@@RetroSpector78 I know, also gives that old-school feeling when you have benchmarks recorded like that, I like :)

[@Ramdileo_sys]

@@RetroSpector78 V330 in a Pentium II? 🤔 .... uumm not sure, these ones go better in Pentium III 500MHz and up 🤓.......... I still have running perfectly fine my Viper V550.... (I run Counter-Strike 1.6 at 1152x864 at 25+ FPS no problem with her over a SE440BX-2 with PIII 750MHz.. and using NVidia Detonator 4.12 😎) ..... I do remember (At least on that same machine) a lot of problems with the V750 (and the new Detonator Drivers)👎, that's why I sold the V750 back then a few days after i bought it 🤫.......... but the V550 do not remember a single game in which i have had a issue 🧐........... She can even run (or actually crawl 🥴 at 7 or 8 fps) using the first DVD edition of Half-Life 2 that i use to have.... but well HL2 is beyond of what a PIII can give you 🤷‍♀...

[@juanschroder6519]

Awesome video!!! Greetings from Argentina!

[@locust76]

If I’m not mistaken, the older Nvidia cards used to take a lot of shortcuts when processing graphics which made them so much faster. If I recall correctly, the ATI cards were more concerned with image quality, hence the poorer performance. I remember that switching from 16- to 32-bit color used to _tank_ performance, even on the fastest GPUs in the late 90’s

[@jefffray]

I had one , putting an heatsink and fan allowed near to double the freq, thanks for your video.

[@ratos74]

Hello! 0:31 - I've a similar model named ELSA Victory, same layout and chipset very interesting. I can upload pictures, and also donate the card to you. Thank you 4 the care of those jewels of time! Subscribed in a flash!

[@CptJistuce]

Never had one of these. Went from an S3 Virge to a RivaTNT. My experience with the Riva128 was exclusively in the form of Windows games with a checkbox labelled stuff like "fix polygon gaps on Riva128."

[@sargonuspa3672]

When i had the riva128 i remember that some games got texture artifacts unless i set the pci texture memory in the forceware driver over a certain amount. It used that memory to store textures even on the pci version.

[@Pillusch]

Nice! Thats the kind of review the good old Riva128 deserved. The only thing that got me wondering : Why didn't you use the official drivers from Diamond? Anyways, I'm glad/honored I could help out ;) Hopefully the Siemens C5 will one day show up in one of your videos again for a more detailed test aswell :) Keep up the good work!

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah should have included that as well ... Might do a really quick follow-up to cover that also. Curious to see what the difference wil be. Thanks again for the kind donation. Really appreciate it, and the Siemens will definitely be on the channel soon, but have so many things on my list you can't believe it :)

[@plasmar1]

those compaq cases were of my fav.... have 2 and love them to bits! only down side is I didn't keep the boards for either, modded it to a generic case pretty much

[@mesterak]

Thank you sharing. I just subbed and look forward to seeing your past and future vids 👍

[@Passenger-nj7in]

damn you should have so much more views / subs. nice video as always

[@RetroSpector78]

You can help out by spreading the word and sharing the content ! :) Hope you enjoyed the video.

[@HanJammer]

I had Diamond Viper 330 PCI back in the day, it was a great alternative to Diamond Monster 3D offering good performance and much better visual quality (those crisp textures with perspective correction!). I still keep several Rivas 128s for my future builds :)

[@tiporari]

This was a fun era in computing. Each generation got significantly better. Very little innovation or motivation to invest in modern parts. Something about CRT's as well. Everything looked great, saturated colors, interpolated by phosphors, even 512x384 looked great in the original unreal engine.

[@mortrek]

Games that are designed for low resolutions look better in them. Conversely, I feel weird playing original Doom in a high res port.

[@chrisducati26]

Hey great video that was My first agp card! It was fast like a voodoo1 with 2d support but i was having quality image problems with many games with initial drivers,i think many of that problems got fixed with the next architecture the TNT.

[@RetroSpector78]

TNT was indeed a nice step up. Riva 128, TNT and TNT2 all were released very shortly after one another. So a lot of innovation in a short timespan.

[@kkx8268]

I think voodoo was a little faster... if i remember correctly. but yeah, were great times also with MATROX MYSTIQUE, which also had some good 3d Performance

[@DxDeksor]

I don't know what's up with nvidia's drivers but I think there's something wrong with the drivers available online. My agp STB Riva 128 (sold with some dell computer) performed much better when I used the drivers that came with it (I got a 3Dmark score of 1500-ish) and I remember that the race looked different too. When I installed nvidia's drivers, the score tanked and the looks of the race changed.

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah should have tried the Diamond Viper V330 drivers. Will probably do that in a follow-up

[@pc-sound-legacy]

Very interesting, thanks fo the comparison PCI vs AGP.

[@francoisfritz198]

Totally under rated channel since the first retro video. Computer in the gift box from germany is an fujitsu siemens scenic 300?

[@LetsPlayKeldeo]

Great video as allways !

[@RetroSpector78]

Thx appreciate it !

[@thepirategamerboy12]

Need for Speed III is a very well optimized game. It's quite playable even in software mode lowest settings on a P233mmx, and with a Voodoo 1 on the same machine at 640x480 runs at around 20-30fps most of the time with a mixture of low, medium, and high settings and imo still looks pretty respectable.

[@wishusknight3009]

I remember running it on my spare 200MMX with a voodoo2 at a lan party. A computer I threw together for a little kid who didn't have his own box. And everyone else had p2's and P3's and the like. And since most of the other computers were either S3, I810 boards, or other cheap stuff, that 200mmx actually kept up, and looked great. That little kid loved his weekend lol.

[@andheeid]

my first nvidia card were riva 128zx from asus

[@freefall2003]

I remember having one of those man did that chip get hot. Yet they figure it didn't need a heat sink

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah .. .heatsinks and coolers weren't really a thing in 1997. Think they only popped up at the end of 1997 / beginning of 1998 when fans also got introduced.

[@modernandretrogaming]

Years ago I'm used ELSA Winner 1000/R3D (which was Riva 128 AGP) with Celeron 333 and worked great for me at that time, even Shadow Man was playable along with Tomb Raider II at some higher resolutions.

[@alejandromoran4590]

I still have the 8mb pci version. I use it with an AMD K6-3 @550mhz. It's great for light 3d games from 1996 to 1997, don't expect it to smoothly run games like Unreal, Quake 3 or anything realeased after 2000

[@kjrchannel1480]

I have one with TV out. It is a shame most of the capabilities of these early cards were not fully realized. In the modern era AMD would not host a Nvidia chip.

[@pentiummmx2294]

im using a Riva TNT PCI in my Pentium II 400 PC

[@RetroSpector78]

Also have the Diamond Viper V550 Riva TNT PCI. With a nice Diamond Multimedia fan on it

[@RaPtOr9600]

I have RIVA 128 ZX the oldest Nvidia AGP card in my collection. Someday i will find aproprirate PC to use it.

[@Chriva]

They're not really that fun except for nostalgia. The first 3d cards were horr-i-ble pieces of hardware, buggy textures, missing features etc. Something like a Geforce 4 and some of the fx series cards are better suited if you just want to play old win9x games. They still have support for all of the hacky stuff that was present in earlier cards (special texture formats etc) while still having a fully implemented driver stacks with awesome performance :)

[@RaPtOr9600]

​@@Chriva I know i tested the card many many times, but its fun to watch it run some of the games like Half Life, Kingpin, SOF, games that really need TnT 1 or TnT 2

[@mortrek]

@@Chriva hey, I loved my Rendition v2200. It just wasn't very fast. I wish they had released their next gen card. They could have won the 3d accelerator wars of the 90s with a much improved v2200.

[@Chriva]

Ever managed to get NFS; Porsche running on it? Been struggling on and off with that particular title over here and it's not having it. Kinda the same reason "for science" :)

[@RaPtOr9600]

@@Chriva Hm no, i didn't try, i tied NFS III, i know TnT2 and TnT 1 running NFS: Porsche. I kind of knew its overkill for ZX, but i will try it when i get my P-III 900mhz system running again.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

Funny thing is that you plugged in pci version of the card and Everest says AGP x1 ;) I wouldn't torture '97 chip with '99 software as 3D evolve rapidly in late 90s. Better to try something period correct like. Quake 2, Tomb Raider, Mechwarrior2, Quake1, Flight Unlimited, Croc legend of the gobbos, Final Reality benchmark and so on. I love early 3D this is why I subscribed to your channel. I own all cards shown pci, agp and higher model ZX, also very interesting and the fastest is Canopus Riva128. I have one card like this. Has unique feature like TV-out. So imagine playing big screen Quake 2 in 1997 on single card. Just unbelievable. Also Canopus core clock slightly higher than competition. Ps: 3dmark99 is coded for newer GPU's like riva tnt. Also riva 128 has some overclocking capabilities

[@RetroSpector78]

Yeah continuity error on my part I taped the everest footage initially using the camera and monitor but then switched to capturing device. By that time I had already swapped the PCI with the AGP one. Nice catch ! YEah I did do Quake 1 / Quake 2 / Final Realitiy and some more optimized games like NFS3. So many games to choose from in 1997/1998

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

@@RetroSpector78 so much good games where released in 90s, you make me dust off some of my retro PCs and run some programs :)

[@PixelPipes]

It's not hard to see why the Riva 128 was a success. Voodoo 1 like performance with 2D support, and widely available in prebuilts? Yeah

[@wishusknight3009]

It was the OEM market that made the card successful. But that really wasn't until after the TnT (and even the tnt2) was out and many companies were putting them in midrange whitebox builds. However at its launch and fir the first little while, it didn't entirely compete very well in the addon aftermarket. 3dfx buttoned that market up pretty tight in those days.

[@Chriva]

I wonder if some models of riva 128 had no bios / it being integrated on later models? Had quite the struggle with mine and had to source a pin compatible eprom since the previous owner had removed the prom (who even does that?)

[@s8wc3]

At one point cards like these were worthless junk, so they could've pulled it to use somewhere else.

[@Chriva]

I'm guilty as charged of such things but those have been e/eeproms. STB's riva 128 cards came with a prom (non-erasable). That's what's making me so confused lol

[@s8wc3]

@@Chriva Ohhh, maybe they took it off and didn't realise it wasn't erasable until they went to program it and just couldn't be bothered putting it back. Who knows

[@drzeissler]

FSC Pro Desktops! yeah! switch on/off via keyboard !

[@ned3and]

I was having Riva 128 ZX 8 MB of vram in 2000 :D

[@lemagreengreen]

I never had a chance to try out a Riva 128, first Nvidia card I had was a TNT2 Ultra which was pretty capable for its time

[@Ghozer]

I remember around this time, that switching between GPU's (even of the same manufacturer) meant you had to rip out the drivers, (fully, using something similar to DDU, or manually deleting files etc) before installing new ones... was especially needed for a manufacturer switch ATI nVidia..... Had issues very similar to what you experienced here with performance otherwise...

[@angieandretti]

NFS III will actually do cockpit view on 3dfx cards but the lack thereof does seem to be a theme among slightly earlier games, ex: Descent II and NFS II. However NFS III, IV, and V do it right on 3dfx.

[@markolafploeg3265]

Nice

[@dougjohnson4266]

I have issues with PCI video cards not working on some mb's but then working on others. (Socket 7 and Socket 3). Very frustrating. Thanks for the video.

[@wishusknight3009]

That is usually down to PCI implementation. The FX5500 PCI for example will not work on the Intel TX chipset unless it is the rarest of its 3 revisions. I have a combo that works but i lucked out on that. I found out later that Phil's computer lab found that most were not usable on the TX boards. Older video boards like the Riva 128 should work fine on most later socket 7 boards, though I would expect issues with the low end SIS and AcerLabs chipsets. And probably Mercury (first pentium chipset on socket 4) and Triton (FX-66) chipsets. Triton2 (VXand HX) chipsets had some bugs ironed out and generally worked on everything upto about year 2000.

[@TheLordbal]

I had this card :)

[@Pulverrostmannen]

I had a time when I was playing on one of these cards and I also had various results in performance. when I had my friends over we played Half-Life multiplayer and it only worked for 30 minutes at a time before the performance dived into unplayable and then we had to restart the game to gain it back for another match. It could also been the fact this was running on a Pentium Pro with 128mb Edo as well . I still have the card so maybe I should take it out sometime and try it out again on a better machine

[@davidlandrum]

I had this card when I was growing up. It was half the cost of a Voodoo card. It ran FS98 about 20 FPS. 🤷🏽‍♂️🤣

[@RetroSpector78]

Also have fond memories of the Riva cards, and the TNT and TNT2

[@cwags75]

My first "gaming" videocard. AGP lol

[@wishusknight3009]

I am wondering if 3dm99 is just too new for that card and therefor makes use of features that the 128 does not properly support. I also have a small request, and that is to compare the i740 to the i810 in as close of an apples to apples that could be managed. Same cpu for example like a celeron 400. And on the first 810 chipset, not the 810e or 815. The i740 would need to be on an LX chipset of some sort.

[@O.Shawabkeh]

Back at that period I had the S3 Trio 3D/2X AGP, but the catch was it lacked 3D acceleration completely. Quake2 and NFS3 played fine on software rendering though.

[@PROSTO4Tabal]

Oh man don't tell me about S3 Trio3D I had that card card on P2 233mmx, Thief 1 had washed out textures and Half Life barely playable

[@wishusknight3009]

The dirth of 3d decelerators to sell computers. The one thing they were good at was ticking boxes on a sales brochure. .. Ohh and dos game support on those old S3's was actually pretty dang good. They do make a great dos vintage video card choice.

[@O.Shawabkeh]

@@wishusknight3009 yeah, custom-PC shops was easy for them to slap it with each unit they sold. I literally sent S3 an email in 2000 asking "why 3D isn't working on my card, already tried various drivers". I was confused with their reply "due to problems with 3D acc. with the previous iteration they opted to remove it completely with the 2X one".

[@momendo]

Did you use the latest NVIDIA Reference detonator drivers 3.37 for the Riva128?

[@RetroSpector78]

Yes I did, but should have also tried the Diamond V330 drivers. Will do that in a quick follow-up video.

[@Horkthane]

@@RetroSpector78 I've been using an STB Velocity 128 in a build lately, and I'm slowing coming to the conclusion that nvidia just left several bugs in their final reference drivers. The STB drivers, though not as mature, generally have better compatibility and performance in games. I really wanted to test an array of different nvidia reference drivers, but they've been difficult to hunt down.

[@Jkauppa]

a computer does not need a cpu/gpu/fpga, just a program/memory unit, assuming you have all calculation results in fast L2-cache rom, yes, it will take teras, but no matter

[@Captain_Char]

this reminds me of Half Life 1, having to get that sweet spot for DirectX or openGL, or just software

[@Captain_Char]

@𝘿!𝙘𝙠 Riding ǤƗяℓ Emma thats certainly a user name, lol

[@kokodin5895]

i wonder if runing glitching games over opengl glide wrapper would improve any resoults

[@wishusknight3009]

Not with this card. Its too primitive. TnT2 though could probably do it, as it supports a wider range of 3d features.

[@kokodin5895]

@@wishusknight3009 riva tnt vanta 16 mb pci? i am not sure if it was tnt or tnt2 but it did launch kotor on my old pentium 3 in place of gf2 mx and no transparency under light sprites and lack of some textures was quite amusing almost as amusing as playing flatout 2 on integrated unichrome graphics of an old athlon 64 pc

[@wishusknight3009]

@@kokodin5895 Hm.. maybe nGlide needed something like a gForce 256 with its hardware T&L? Not sure what would be the earliest the card could be. I use a radeon 9700 pro for my nGlide build lol.

[@kokodin5895]

@@wishusknight3009 i was more wondering about what card i used in last 20 years could fit that compaq and be of similar vintage to still work with windows 98 with no need for direct x 9 because retro games not always like it

[@joetheman74]

Not riva as in river but riva as in REEVA like in READ, SEED, NEED, BEAD or BLEED.

[@wishusknight3009]

Welcome to European accents..

[@RetroSpector78]

You know I always had it like that in my head but got brainwashed by Phils Computer Labs videos :)

[@Wok_Agenda]

In DEED

[@francoisfritz198]

Back in the days, im remember when i sold theses riva cards, they are very buggy : low frame rate, artifacts, non runing game and not cheap at all..

[@mesterak]

Could you have used nGlide to help with some of the games that were glitching?

[@jasonknight1085]

I don't think I've ever heard ANYONE pronounce it that way. The Spanish, French and Italian pronunciations is "Ree va". Like how you say "Viva". Set my teeth on edge every time you said it.

[@velosiped135]

Would this work better in my P1 MMX with my Voodoo1, or in my P2 MMX with 2XVoodoo2's in SLI?

[@oldschooldude8370]

It would benefit from the p2. You'd want an agp version though as your pci bus already has the v2s.

[@-x21-]

Fraps is limiting framerate. You should get an improvement without it running on the quake benchmarks.

[@thedopplereffect00]

Why the heck are you trying to benchmark a RIVA128 at 800x600? Did you even disable anti aliasing? This is one of the earliest 3D cards, everyone was running 640x480 or less back then.