This Diamond Viper V330 uses an nVidia RIVA 128 chipset. The RIVA 128 (NV3) was released in late 1997 as successor of the NV1 and combined 2D and 3D in one chip. RIVA stands for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator.

In end of 1997, 3Dfx already established a name in the 3D market with the Voodoo Graphics card. This Direct3D 5.0-capable card from nVidia was directly compared with the Voodoo Graphics. Performance, image quality and drivers were discussed. As far as I'm aware of the Voodoo Graphics was more popular as no-one in my area started talking about nVidia until the Riva TNT made its debut. > Read more

The RIVA TNT (codename NV4) is a 2D/3D graphics chip and was the factor to get nVidia in the 3D business.

RIVA is an acronym for Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator and TNT refers to the chip's ability to work on two texels at once (TwiN Texel).

With this card nVidia hoped to match the Voodoo2 but didn't succeed. The chip didn't meet expectations and was running quite hot. To get it reliable nVidia reduced the initial clock frequenties which also lowered performance. > Read more

This is the competitor of the Voodoo3. With the TNT2 nVidia made a good chip capable of all the new 3D techniques. One 'big' difference with the Voodoo3 is 32-bit rendering where the Voodoo3 only did 16-bit. Even though the Voodoo3 rendered more than 16-bits internally (with 22-bit output) people often claim that the 16-bit output is 'worthless'. Image comparisons don't show the exact image quality of the Voodoo3 because not everything that creates the final image is rendered in the Voodoo3-chip itself.

An interesting twist can be found on this Diamond Viper V770 Ultra; it can be configured at AGP2x or AGP4x manually by using a jumper.

Generally speaking the V770 Ultra was a good card. It lasted pretty long (performance wise) while providing good image quality. > Read more