RIVA 128/ZX/TNT FAQ

1. Does RIVA 128 support non-Windows based operating systems?
A Linux driver has been developed by an independent third-party, and is not officially supported by NVIDIA. The driver is available at http://www.suse.de/XSuSE/XSuSE_E.html. There is also a TNT driver for Linux as part of the glx project: http://glx.on.openprojects.net. NVIDIA plans to support Linux in future products.

2. Does RIVA 128 support AGP 2X mode?
RIVA was designed with the Intel 440LX chipset in mind. It employs a sophisticated DMA engine and cache/buffer architecture that optimizes and sustains data transfer rates necessary to maintain constant flow into the graphics pipeline. The 128’s AGP 1X mode has more than enough bandwidth to accomplish this task.

3. How do I disable dithering on the RIVA 128 and 128ZX?
This is not possible on the RIVA 128 and 128ZX

4. Are there any independent on-line reviews of the RIVA 128?
http://www.tc.umn.edu/~reda0003/Zone128/ - Zone 128
http://www.riva128.com - RIVA128.com
http://www.midtnweb.com/rivaextreme/ - RIVA Extreme http://pages.prodigy.net/babblin5/Main.html - RIVA Homepage
http://sysdoc.pair.com/agp-video.html - Tom's hardware guide.
http://www.jpa.com/benchmarks/home.html- Jon Peddie Associates - Benchmark Page
http://www.pcme.com/HARDWARE/3DPT6/3dpt6.htm - A review of eight 3D accelerator boards.
http://www.hal-pc.org/~kraemer/ - Independent RIVA 128 review.
http://www.rivazone.com/ - RIVA 128 User's group
http://www.monmouth.com - General hardware review page

5. Why does RIVA 128 only support a 4MB frame buffer?
The RIVA 128 was primarily targeted for the consumer mainstream market, so balancing cost and performance was key. Since RIVA 128 uniquely has the capability to store textures in off-screen memory on both PCI and AGP platforms, we did not feel it necessary to burden the graphics card with the additional cost of memory. With virtually unlimited system texture memory and a target resolution of 800x600 with 16-bit color double-buffered, 4MB is the ideal frame buffer size.

6. Does the RIVA 128's "floating-point polygon setup" engine offload the floating point processing which the CPU's FPU would otherwise have to do?
The RIVA 128 floating-point setup engine is dedicated to perform triangle setup. The CPU still performs transformation and lighting calculations. Since the RIVA 128 offloads the triangle setup operation from the CPU, it allows the CPU to process more triangles, thereby improving both geometric fidelity and frame rate.

7. How does RIVA 128 perform with various CPU speeds?
RIVA 128 is designed for both Pentium and Pentium II-class machines. It's powerful 100MHz 128-bit architecture, capable of processing 5 GFLOPS and 15 billion operations per second, provides maximum 2D and 3D acceleration for every application, regardless of which CPU it's being processed on. However, because of this massive processing capability, RIVA 128 can scale with CPU's even faster than the current Pentium II 300 MHz.