Nvidia emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128/NV3 architecture history and overview

NVIDIA emulation journey, part 1: RIVA 128 / NV3 architecture history and basic overview February 25, 2025 - written by starfrost013 Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of guest posts by starfrost013 going over the architecture of NVIDIA’s first commercially-successful product, and the ongoing effort to get it emulated on 86Box. It gets more technical than all our previous posts, but there is little detailed information out there on this chip that helped launch NVIDIA into success, so we’ve decided to publish this saga here. Note: Documents wanted If you are in possession of any of: NVIDIA RIVA 128 Programmers’ Reference Manual NVIDIA RIVA 128 Customer Evaluation Kit (we have the NV1 CEK version 1.22) NVIDIA RIVA 128 Turnkey Manufacturing Package Source code (drivers, VBIOS, etc) related to the NVIDIA RIVA 128 Any similar documents, excluding the well-known datasheet , with technical information about a GPU going by the name “NV3”, “STG-3000”, “RIVA 128”, “NV3T”, “RIV ... Read full article.