more fixes

_posts/2025-01-17-riva128-part-1.md

@@ -47,9 +47,9 @@ At this point, Nvidia had no sales, no customers, and barely any money (at some
 
 However, this was nothing compared to the body blow about to hit the entire industry, Nvidia included. At a conference in early 1996, an $80,000 SiliconGraphics (then the world leader in accelerated graphics) machine crashed during a demo by the then-CEO Ed McCracken. While they were rebooting the machine, if accounts of the event are to be believed, the people in the event started leaving, many of which, based in rumours that they had heard heading downstairs to another demo by a then-tiny company made up of ex-SGI employes calling itself "3D/fx" (later shortened to 3dfx), which was claiming comparable graphics quality for $250...and had demos to prove it. In many of the cases of supposed "wonder innovations" in the tech industry, it turns out to be too good to be true, but when their card, the "Voodoo Graphics" was first released in the form of the "Righteous 3D" by Orchid in October 1996, it turned out to be true. Despite the fact that it was a 3D-only card and required a 2D card to be installed, and the fact it could not accelerate graphics in a window (which almost all other 3d cards could do), the card's performance was so high relative to the other efforts (including the NV1) that it not only had rave reviews on its own but kicked off a revolution in consumer 3D graphics, which especially caught fire when GLQuake was released in January 1997.
 
-The reasons that 3dfx was able to design such an effective GPU when all others failed are numerous - the price of RAM plummeted by 80% through 1996  (which allowed 3dfx to cut their estimated retail price for the Voodoo from $1000 to $300), many of their staff members came from what at that time was perhaps the most respected and certainly the largest company in the graphics industry, SiliconGraphics (which by 1997 had over fifteen years of experience in developing graphical hardware), and while 3dfx used the proprietary Glide API, it also supported OpenGL and Direct3D - Glide was designed to be very similar to OpenGL while allowing for 3dfx to approximate standard graphical techniques, which, as well as their driver design - the Voodoo only accelerates edge interpolation (where a triangle is converted into "spans" of horizontal lines, and the positions of nearby vertexes are used to determine the span's start and end positions), texture mapping and blending, span interpolation (which to simplify a complex topic generally involves, in a GPU of this era, z-buffering, also known as depth buffering, sorting polygons back to front, and color buffering, storing the color of each pixel sent to the screen in a buffer which allows for blending and alpha transparency), and final presentation of the rendered 3D scene - the rest was all done in software. All of these reasons were key to the low price and high quality of the card. 
+The reasons that 3dfx was able to design such an effective GPU when all others failed are numerous - the price of RAM plummeted by 80% through 1996 (which allowed 3DFX to cut their estimated retail price for the Voodoo from $1000 to $300), many of their staff members came from what at that time was perhaps the most respected and certainly the largest company in the graphics industry - SiliconGraphics (which by 1997 had over fifteen years of experience in developing graphical hardware, but was also suffering from rampant mismanagement and in what would prove to be terminal decline), and while 3dfx used the proprietary Glide API, it also supported OpenGL and Direct3D - Glide was designed to be very similar to OpenGL while allowing for 3dfx to approximate standard graphical techniques, which, as well as their driver design - the Voodoo only accelerates edge interpolation (where a triangle is converted into "spans" of horizontal lines, and the positions of nearby vertexes are used to determine the span's start and end positions), texture mapping and blending, span interpolation (which to simplify a complex topic generally involves, in a GPU of this era, z-buffering, also known as depth buffering, sorting polygons back to front, and color buffering, storing the color of each pixel sent to the screen in a buffer which allows for blending and alpha transparency), and final presentation of the rendered 3D scene - the rest was all done in software. All of these reasons were key to the low price and high quality of the card. 
 
-Effectively, Nvidia had to design a graphics architecture that could at very least get close to 3dfx's performance, on a shoestring budget, with very little resources (60% of the staff, including the entire sales and marketing teams, having been laid off to preserve money). Since they did not have the time, they not only could not completely redesign the NV1 from scratch if they felt the need to do this (this would take two years - time that Nvidia didn't have - and any design that came out of this effort would be immediately obsoleted by other companies, such as 3dfx's Voodoo line and ATI with its initially rather pointless, but rapidly advancing in performance and driver stability, Rage series of chips) the chip would have to work reasonably well on the first tapeout, as they simply did not have the capital to produce more revisions of the chip, The fact they were able to achieve a successful design in the form of the NV3 under such conditions was testament to the intelligence, skill and luck of Nvidia's designers. Later on in this blogpost, we will explore how they managed to achieve this.
+Effectively, Nvidia had to design a graphics architecture that could at very least get close to 3dfx's performance, on a shoestring budget, with very little resources (60% of the staff, including the entire sales and marketing teams, having been laid off to preserve money). Since they did not have the time, they not only could not completely redesign the NV1 from scratch if they felt the need to do this (this would take two years - time that Nvidia simply didn't have - and any design that came out of this effort would be immediately obsoleted by other companies, such as 3dfx's Voodoo line and ATI with its initially rather pointless, but rapidly advancing in performance and driver stability, Rage series of chips) the chip would have to work reasonably well on the first tapeout, as they simply did not have the capital to produce more revisions of the chip, The fact they were able to achieve a successful design in the form of the NV3 under such conditions was testament to the intelligence, skill and luck of Nvidia's designers. Later on in this blogpost, we will explore how they managed to achieve this.
 
 ### The NV3 (Riva 128)
 It was with these financial, competitive and time constraints in mind that design on the NV3, which would eventually be commercialised as the RIVA 128 ("Real-time Interactive Video and Animation accelerator", with the 128 owing to its at-the-time very large 128-bit size of its internal bus), began in 1996. Nvidia retained SGS-Thomson (soon to be renamed to STMicroelectronics, which is the name it is still under today) as the manufacturing partner, in return for SGS-Thomson cancelling their rival GPU - the STG-3001. In a similar vein to the NV1, Nvidia was initially going to sell the card as the "NV3" with inbuilt audio functionality and SGS-Thomson was going to white-label the chip as the SGS-Thomson STG-3000 without audio functionality - it seems, based on the original contract language, which for some reason is [**only available on a website for example contracts, where it has been around since 2004**](https://contracts.onecle.com/nvidia/sgs.collab.1993.11.10.shtml), but appears to have originated from a filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, based on the format and references to "the Commission", that Nvidia convinced them to cancel their own GPU, the STG-3001, and manufacture the NV3 instead - which would prove to be a terrible decision for STMicro when Nvidia dropped them and moved to TSMC for the RIVA 128ZX due to yield issues, and the fact that Nvidia's venture capital funders were pressuring them to move to TSMC. STMicro manufactured PowerVR cards for a few more years, but they had dropped out of the market entirely by 2001.