nVidia

Founded in 1993 by Jensen Huang, Chris Malachowsky, and Curtis Priem, nVidia is a graphics card manufacturer for the IBM PC and its compatibles. They are based in Santa Clara, CA.

Joining the market late in the DOS era, they went head to head with ATi Technologies in the gaming video card market, and still do to this day (with ATi now a part of AMD).

nVidia's headquarters in Santa Clara, CA.

After a dismal start with their first graphics chip, the NV1, the company focussed solely on 3D gaming. The follow-up graphics processor, called NV3, gave their card, the RIVA 128 a competitive edge over the then-performance benchmark in 3D, the 3Dfx Voodoo Graphics.

nVidia were the first to bring DDR (double data rate) SDRAM to the graphics card market in the form of the GeForce 256, effectively doubling the memory bandwidth their cards could support. This card also was the first to include hardware acceleration for Transform & Lighting (T&L), taking a lot of processing burden off the CPU.

Here is a table showing all nVidia chipsets during the DOS era in chronological order:

AGP and PCI Chipsets
NV1 (1995) RIVA 128 (NV3) (1997) RIVA TNT (NV4) (1998) RIVA TNT2 (NV5) (1999) GeForce 256 (1999)