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

An exploration of efforts to create a functional emulation of NVIDIA GPUs.

NVIDIA was conceived in 1992 by three LSI Logic and Sun Microsystems engineers: Jensen Huang (now one of the world’s richest men, still the CEO and, apparently, mobbed by fans in his country of birth Taiwan), Curtis Priem (whose boss almost convinced him to work on Java instead of founding the company) and Chris Malachowsky (a veteran of graphics chip development). In a perhaps ironic twist of fate, toilet paper turned out to be an apt metaphor for the sales, if not quality, of their first product, which Jensen Huang appears to be embarassed to discuss when asked, and has been quoted as saying “You don’t build NV1 because you’re great”. 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.

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