List of GPUs

This is a list of all models of Nvidia GPUs. Although the focus of this wiki is on older models (approximately those released between 1995 and 2000), all GPUs manufactured by Nvidia are provided here for the purposes of reference. GPUs are sorted by architectural revision, not branding, since Nvidia (especially in the 2000s) sometimes made dozens of mdoels for a particular "series" and the list would be full of hundreds of almost identical SKUs.

Quadratic texture mappers

NV0

Main article: NV0

Not actually a GPU, but a series of VxD drivers under Windows 3.x to emulate the NV1 environment before it was ready.

Features

• Unknown

NV1

Main article: NV1

The first GPU (or as it was dubbed by Nvidia at the time, "Multimedia Accelerator") designed by Nvidia and manufactured by SGS-Thomson Microelectronics (now STMicroelectronics), designed starting in 1993 and ending with its release in 1995. Its name is a contraction of "GX Next Version" (GXNV), as the GPU was designed by the same person, Curtis Priem, who designed the Sun GX for graphics workstations; Huang mandated the rename to NV1 for legal reasons. Unlike all later released Nvidia graphics cards, it does not render using triangles as the fundamental basis of graphical rendering but instead by using quad patching to implement quadratic texture mapped (QTM)'d curves. This has advantages for certain applications, such as computer-aided design and smooth curved surfaces, but is much more cumbersome for programming and game engine development, which was the intended market. There are also many other unique features, as Nvidia's strategy at this time was to attempt to monopolise all of the I/O on the graphical hardware. Ultimately it failed, due to its high cost, poor VGA functionality, and poor Direct3D (which was based on graphical hardware), and was discontinued in Q1 of 1996, not long after its launch. Apparently, at least 250,000 chips were sold, but most of them were returned without ever being put into cards due to poor sales; the poor sales also appear to have led to the cancellation of a 350 nm die shrink.

The original text (barring some minor redactions) of the "Strategic Collaboration Agreement" to develop the Nvidia NV1, RIVA 128 (NV3) and RIVA 128 ZX (NV3T) with SGS-Thomson can be found in a 1998 SEC filing, as it was an agreement that materially affected investors scoping out the company for potential investment during the IPO process.

Features

• 2D acceleration supporting BitBlit (both src/dst and pattern), clipping rectangles, points, lines, lins (lines without their starting and ending pixels), hardware-accelerated cursors, and image upload (from various sources) with a maximum resolution of 1600x1200 and a maximum colour depth of 32-bit. Drivers implement GDI, possibly DCI (Windows 3.x drivers for the NV1 have not been identified) and DirectDraw
• Hardware accelerated alpha-testing (chroma key), plane mask and clipping rectangle with double buffering and page flipping support
• 3D quadratic texture mapping (QTM) for perfect curved surface rendering with bilinear filtering support
• 3D Quadrilateral and Triangle rendering (however much slower than QTMs and not the primary focus)
• Two-cache Gray-code indexed FIFO (one with a size of one; another with 32 total entries) for graphical command ("object" submission)
• Hash table for further object caching
• Multi-channel DMA engine with 8 DMA channels, each with 8 subchannels (selectable by "context switching")
• Pseudo-C++ object system for total lunacy in design
• Notification functionality via DMA into driver memory for GPU to driver communication
• 1 to 4 MB of video memory, which can either be DRAM or VRAM
• Oddly addressed PRAMIN area
• External RAMDAC (`NVDAC`), manufactured and, for some DACs, designed by SGS-Thomson, for CRT control and image generation from the data sent to the GPU

This particular model of graphics card has many unique features that are not shared by any other model of Nvidia graphics card.

• Non-Sound Blaster compatible sound card with MIDI playback on-die (in some models)
• Sega Saturn game port support (in the external DAC)
• Partial VGA compatibility, largely emulated in software
• EEPROM for storage of chip ID
• Unused hardware-implemented encryption and digital rights management functionality
• VESA Local Bus support, as well as PCI (seemingly only PCI versions were released as VLB was relatively short-lived)
• Proprietary NVLIB API to avoid direct hardware programming

NV2

Main article: NV2

The NV2 was a GPU designed under contract from Sega for the "Saturn V08", the first version of the project that became the Sega Dreamcast, starting in May 1995 around the time of the announcement of the NV1. It was cancelled, at some point around early to mid 1996, due to internal pressure from Sega (especially their AM2 division) to move to a triangle-based model, combined with possible intransigence on Nvidia's part. SEGA still paid (loaned then forgave) NVIDIA 5 million dollars, which prevented the company from going bankrupt immediately. Most information on the technical implementation of the NV2 comes from Don Goddard, who was the main employee tasked with programming the NV2 (via a software emulator on the NV1) - which he described as "hella confusing", and with no debugging - at Sega of America.

New features

• Proto-shader microcode similar to the Nintendo 64 Reality Coprocessor & Reality Signal Processor GPU to handle texture compression, lighting, positions, and texture U/V coordinates
• Possibly hardware-accelerated lighting
• Color compression
• Hardware-accelerated Z-buffering
• Cartridge DMA (yes, cartridge) via the PCART subsystem
• No VGA compatibility, as it was a game console GPU

The status on if the NV2 ever worked as physical hardware is disputed; it was certainly taped out (even if only for one stepping, A0), and failed a demonstration to Sega, which may have triggered the cancellation of the project. However, some sources claim that a single engineer, Wayne Kogachi, was assigned to and was successfully able to product a working chip. This was done in order to trigger an $1 million milestone payment, which was required due to the company's zero sales at the time.

NV3 (Quadratic Texture Mapped version)

Main article: NV3 (QTM)

Before David Kirk was hired at Nvidia, Nvidia were planning to launch a QTM-based "NV3" (entirely separate to the product launched as the Riva 128), a 100% functional superset of NV1 for PCs. It was announced around March 1996 for volume production in October of 1996, and was apparently going to be used in a home theater system by Lexicon, as the audio chip, provide an integrated RAMDAC and be generally much faster. It was most likely cancelled extremely quickly after its announcement, owing to Nvidia's new direction of developing triangle-based graphics accelerators. Very little else is known about it (other than the fact it would apparently be able to process 500,000 50-pixel triangles per second) and the original press release, published on 22 January 1996, does not mention the NV3, but also calls the NV1 NVIDIA's "first generation" product. However, it does not seem to be a typo on the part of Microprocessor Report since it is repeated many times and explicitly stated to be a PC graphics card, which the NV2 was not.

Fixed function, no T&L (RIVA)

NV3 (RIVA 128)

Main article: NV3

David Kirk left Crystal Dynamics to replace Curtis Priem as the manager of GPU development at Nvidia after the NV2 was cancelled, and decided that sane design was the best way to go. Across nine months in 1996 and 1997, a triangle-based design was thrown together (completed in approximately January 1997?), tested extensively on a hardware simulator from another nearly-bankrupt company called Ikos (as Nvidia did not have the money for more than one revision of the chip without sales), and then taped out around 1 April 1997. The card was demoed at CGDC 1997, with Direct3D drivers that had only had crash bugs fixed hours before the demo and OpenGL drivers that had only achieved any functionality at all two days earlier, and were apparently "slow and buggy". The card launched as the "RIVA 128" (Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator, 128-bit bus) in August 1997 (while the earliest known drivers are GDI-only NT 4.0 drivers compiled on 17 July 1997, these seem to have simply been an accidental release of pre-release drivers with an OEM card as they are an extreme outlier, with the earliest Win9x drivers and generic Nvidia drivers dated mid-August). OpenGL drivers were first released in alpha form in December 1997 and full form in March 1998.

The card was very successful, at least compared to previous models and caused Nvidia's revenue to jump from $5.5 million in the first nine months of 1997 to $23.5 million in the last few months - several million were manufactured. Driver support ended in early 1999 (although 2D-only drivers continued to be compiled for Windows 2000 and XP until 2001) and manufacturing ended some time in mid to late 1999 for the ZX variant.

New features

• Triangle-based rendering mostly compliant with the DirectX 5.0 specification (apparently, they did not receive the final spec in time, resulting in certain blending modes being missing)
• Non-crappy Direct3D drivers (the NV1 D3D drivers are simply wrappers around the native quad patching)
• Full OpenGL Installable Client Driver with OpenGL 1.1 compliance (released in early 1998)
• GDI acceleration for clipped rectangles, transparent bitmaps, and 1bpp color-expanded bit blit
• The ability to scale and stretch images while receiving them from the main system (`USCALED` and `USTRTCH` objects(
• Generic image upload objects
• AGP 1X bus support
• Up to 4 buffers which can be moved around in memory and have their pitch and color format changed at any time, the 3rd buffer is hardcoded in the drivers to be used as a "zeta buffer" (interleaved Z and stencil buffer), allowing much more versatile (and annoying) screen-to-screen blit capability
• Hardware-accelerated stencil buffering
• Multiple interpolation modes for texture interpolation (zero order hold, "Microsoft" zero order hold and full order hold)
• Hardware-accelerated Z-buffering (in a released card)
• Perspective-correct texture mapping (QTMs used forward texture mapping)
• RGB565 textures (later drivers only); technically, the output format in 3D is always 32-bit, but only 16-bit source texture data can be loaded
• Hardware-accelerated culling
• Hardware-accelerated 3D alpha buffer
• Hardware-accelerated specular highlight
• Hardware-accelerated texture offseting (varying the origin point of a texture)
• Hardware fog support with 24-bit colour
• Hardware-accelerated color space conversion
• YUV420 and YUV422 support
• PC-98 support ("NEC mode")
• Moved to a new 350 nm process rather than 500 nm
• "Mediaport" on-card that allows plugging in external MPEG decoder
• TV-Out support
• RAMDAC and CRTC integrated on-die
• Multiple clock sources (`VPLL` for pixel clock, varying based on resolution and color depth for controlling the CRT, and `MPLL` for everything else - the card ran at 100Mhz on average)
• "DFB" (Dumb Framebuffer) in PCI BAR1 allowing you to write into

Removed features

• Quadratic texture mapping (QTM) support
• Quad patching more generally
• VLB bus support
• 3D capability at resolutions above 960*720 due to the GPU keeping more data in VRAM, NV1 could do up to 1152*864

NV3T (RIVA 128 ZX)

Main article: NV3 § NV3T

When Intel announced the Intel i740 GPU, Nvidia got cold feet and decided to rev a new version, revision C, of the RIVA 128, add some minor features, allow for 8 MB of VRAM and rebrand it as a new version.

Added features

• 8 MB of VRAM, rather than just 2 or 4
• 1080p and 1920x1200 resolution support in the BIOS
• 3D capability at resolutions above 960*720 is better again
• The ability to write to `PSTRAPS`
• ACPI support (indicated by the PCI device ID changing to `0x0019`)
• Notifiers to VRAM rather than just the main system RAM (check this)
• Much higher colour depths in 2D due to (16-bit is still only supported in 3D, because only 16-bit texture formats can be loaded by PGRAPH)
• AGP 2X bus support

Rubin architecture (still in development)

This is Nvidia's 2026 architecture for GPUs.