Famous Graphics Chips: Nvidia’s RIVA 128

It wasn’t an April fool’s joke in 1997 when Nvidia released the RIVA 128 on April 1, based on the NV3 media accelerator. However, it was almost the company’s last gasp. The story begins in 1993 when Nvidia was founded in Sunnyvale. The company’s founders had a novel idea for a graphics accelerator based on quadratic surfaces, a significant departure from the more established polygonal approach used by other firms.  The NV1. The company came out of stealth mode in July 1995 and announced its first chip, the NV1, which it described as a Media Accelerator. The single-chip media accelerator,