Small after-the-fact review on riva128

Author: richardg867

_posts/2025-02-25-riva128-part-1.md

@@ -78,15 +78,15 @@ By the end of 1996, things had gotten infinitely worse, with the competition hea
 
 However, this was nothing compared to the body blow about to hit the entire industry, NVIDIA included. At a conference in early 1996, an $80,000 machine from SiliconGraphics, then the world leader in accelerated graphics, crashed during a demo by the then-CEO Ed McCracken. If accounts of the event are to be believed, while the machine rebooted, people who had heard rumors left the room and headed downstairs to another demo by a then-tiny company made up of ex-SGI employes calling themselves "3D/fx" (later shortened to 3dfx), claiming comparable graphics quality for $250... with demos to prove it. As with many cases of supposed "wonder innovations" in the tech industry, it was too good to be true, but when their card, the "Voodoo Graphics" was first released in the form of the "Righteous 3D" by Orchid in October 1996, it turned out to be true. Despite the fact that it was a 3D-only card and required a 2D card to be installed, and the fact it could not accelerate graphics in a window (which almost all other cards could do), performance was so high relative to other products (including the NV1) that it not only had rave reviews on its own but also kicked off a revolution in consumer 3D graphics, which especially caught fire when GLQuake was released in January 1997.
 
-The reasons for 3dfx being able to design such an effective GPU when all others failed were numerous. The price of RAM plummeted by 80% throughout 1996, allowing the Voodoo's estimated retail price to be cut from $1000 to $300; many of their staff members came from SiliconGraphics, perhaps the most respected and certainly the largest company in the graphics industry of that time[^sgi]; and while 3dfx used the proprietary Glide API, it also supported OpenGL and Direct3D. Glide was designed to be very similar to OpenGL while allowing for 3dfx to approximate standard graphical techniques, which, as well as their driver design - the Voodoo only accelerates edge interpolation[^edge], texture mapping and blending, span interpolation[^span], and final presentation of the rendered 3D scene - the rest was all done in software. All of these factors were key in what proved to be an exceptionally low price for what was considered to be an exceptionally high quality for the time of the card.
+The reasons for 3dfx being able to design such an effective GPU when all others failed were numerous. The price of RAM plummeted by 80% throughout 1996, allowing the Voodoo's estimated retail price to be cut from $1000 to $300; many of their staff members came from SiliconGraphics, perhaps the most respected and certainly the largest company in the graphics industry of that time[^sgi]; and while the Voodoo used a proprietary API called Glide, it also supported OpenGL and Direct3D. Glide was designed to be very similar to OpenGL while allowing for 3dfx to approximate standard graphical techniques, which, as well as their driver design; the Voodoo only accelerates edge interpolation[^edge], texture mapping and blending, span interpolation[^span], and final presentation of the rendered 3D scene, while the rest is all done in software. All of these factors were key in what proved to be an exceptionally high-quality product at an exceptionally low price for the time.
 
 [^sgi]: By 1997, SGI had over 15 years of experience in developing graphics hardware, while also suffering from rampant mismanagement and experiencing the start of what would later prove to be their terminal decline.
 
 [^edge]: In the edge interpolation process, a triangle is converted into "spans" of horizontal lines, and the positions of nearby vertexes are used to determine the span's start and end positions.
 
 [^span]: To simplify a complex topic, in a GPU of this era, span interpolation generally involves Z-buffering (also known as depth buffering), sorting polygons back to front, and color buffering, storing the color of each pixel sent to the screen in a buffer which allows for blending and alpha transparency. Some GPUs do not implement a Z-buffer and delegate polygon sorting to software instead; examples include the NV1, original ATI Rage and the PlayStation 1's Geometry Transformation Engine.
 
-Effectively, NVIDIA had to design a graphics architecture that could at the very least get close to 3dfx's performance, on a shoestring budget and with very little resources, as 60% of their staff (including the entire sales and marketing teams) had been laid off to preserve money. They could not do a complete redesign of the NV1 from scratch if they felt the need to, as it would take two years (time they simply didn't have) and any design that came out of this effort would be immediately obsoleted by competitors, such as 3dfx's Voodoo series, and ATI's Rage which was initially rather pointless but rapidly advancing in performance and driver stability. The chip would also have to work reasonably well on the first tapeout, as there was no capital to produce more revisions of the chip. The fact NVIDIA were able to achieve a successful design in the form of the NV3 under such conditions was a testament to the intelligence, skill and luck of their designers; we will explore how they managed to achieve this later on this write-up.
+Meanwhile, NVIDIA effectively had to design a graphics architecture that could at the very least get close to 3dfx's performance, on a shoestring budget and with very little resources, as 60% of their staff (including the entire sales and marketing teams) had been laid off to preserve money. They could not do a complete redesign of the NV1 from scratch if they felt the need to, as it would take two years (time they simply didn't have) and any design that came out of this effort would be immediately obsoleted by competitors, such as 3dfx's Voodoo series, and ATI's Rage which was initially rather pointless but rapidly advancing in performance and driver stability. The chip would also have to work reasonably well on the first tapeout, as there was no capital to produce more revisions of the chip. The fact NVIDIA were able to achieve a successful design in the form of the NV3 under such conditions was a testament to the intelligence, skill and luck of their designers; we will explore how they managed to achieve this later on this write-up.
 
 ### The NV3