It had initially pursued a completely different type of rendering technology called quadratic texture mapping with its first product, the NV1.

[3] Then the company had spent a year trying to use its inferior technology to build the graphics chip for Sega's Dreamcast video game console.

The NV1 chip had been designed for a completely different type of rendering technology called quadratic texture mapping, which is not supported by Direct3D.

[3][4][5] The graphics accelerator consists of 3.5 million transistors built on SGS-Thomson's 5LM 350 nm fabrication process and is clocked at 100 MHz.

In this "fast and wide" configuration, as Nvidia referred to it, the RIVA 128 performed admirably for GUI acceleration compared to competitors.

The ability to build a system with just one graphics card, and still have it be feature-complete for the time, made the RIVA 128 a lower-cost high-performance solution.

[10] The ZX version was fabricated by SGS-Thomson and TSMC, and uses an 8 MB SGRAM memory chip, clocked at 125 MHz, from Samsung Electronics.

Nvidia designed the RIVA 128 with a maximum memory capacity of 4 MiB because, at the time, this was the cost-optimal approach for a consumer 3D accelerator.

[12] This was the case partly because of the chip's capability to store textures in off-screen system RAM in both PCI or AGP configurations.

[13][14] At the time of the RIVA 128's release, 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics had firmly established itself as the 3D hardware benchmark against which all newcomers were compared.

[5] This caused the different texture detail levels to "pop" into place as the player moved through a game and approached each polygon, instead of allowing a seamless, gradual per-pixel transition.

In addition, because the RIVA 128 can render at resolutions higher than 640×480, the card can offer quality superior to that of Voodoo Graphics, as shown in the above Quake II screenshot.

The final drivers released for the RIVA 128 support per-pixel mipmapping, full-scene anti-aliasing (supersampling), and a number of options to fine-tune features in order to optimize quality and performance.

Like the competing ATI Rage Pro, RIVA 128 was never able to accelerate the popular Unreal Engine in Direct3D mode due to missing hardware features.