[Hardware] These are the best NVIDIA graphics cards ever

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NVIDIA is today synonymous with graphics cards, and those of Santa Clara are without a doubt one of the most important companies in the history of hardware. With a history behind it that dates back to the early 90s, there have been many generations, there have been many models of graphics cards and we have seen how the company co-founded by Jen-Hsun Huang has gone through ups and downs, but with more moments of glory than pain. Today we are going to remind you of those moments of glory.

NVIDIA was founded in 1993 by Jen-Hsun Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem. Its first product was the NV1 chip that was used in the Diamond Edge 3D launched in 1995 and despite what NVIDIA is today, it was a real commercial fiasco.

NVIDIA DIAMOND EDGE 3D

The NV2, on the other hand, was never on the market, since it was a contract with Sega America to make a slightly more advanced version of its failed Sega Saturn, but the contract was not concluded due to the cancellation by Sega of the project , which was called the Sega Saturn V08.

The first two designs that NVIDIA made were based on rendering by quads instead of triangles, so they did not follow the standard model when rendering scenes in 3D, this forced NVIDIA to follow the path of the rest of the manufacturers of graphics cards and it was with the NV3 that the NVIDIA legend began to take off with its first successful graphics chip.

The best NVIDIA graphics cards ever
NVIDIA Wireframe Logo

Next we leave you a list, there are not all those that have appeared in the market, but, if those that marked a before and after in the graphics card market starting with the Pre-GeForce era until today, we hope you enjoy of this retrospective that we have prepared for you.

Long before the GeForce, the Riva name was related to NVIDIA and its first major launch was the Riva 128, unlike its direct rival, the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics, it is a graphics that integrated the 3D accelerator on a single chip and the VGA.

We are talking about a graphics chip that was created in the era where there were no shader units and they did not calculate the geometry on the graphics chip itself, so that stage depended on the CPU.

The Riva 128 despite being a notable card suffered from the poor quality of the DirectX API at that time compared to the proprietary Glide API of 3Dfx, but it is remembered for being the graphics card with which NVIDIA started its legend in the footsteps false initials.

RIVA TNT Series (NV4 & NV5)
NVIDIA RIVA TNT 2

The second generation of the NVIDIA RIVA came with an improved raster unit that allowed them to take advantage of the greater power of the Pentium II and AMD K6 of the time when it came to processing scene geometry.

Like the RIVA 128, this is a graphics chip that incorporated both the VGA part and the 3D accelerator, whose main novelty were its two texture units from which it owed its name, TwiN Texel.

It was the first time that NVIDIA surpassed 3Dfx in specifications, since it allowed rendering with 32 bits of color and supported textures of 2048 × 2028 pixels while the Voodoo were limited to 256 × 256. Additionally, the direct rival to the first Riva TNT, the 3Dfx Voodoo Banshee, had a single texture unit.