Drivers and APIs
Drivers were, for a significant portion of the card's life, rather rough. Not only were the aforementioned Direct3D issues apparent, but the card lacked good OpenGL support. With RIVA 128, Nvidia began their quest for top-quality OpenGL support, eventually resulting in the board being a capable OpenGL performer. One major disadvantage for Nvidia was that many games during RIVA 128's lifetime used 3Dfx's proprietary Glide API. Legally, only 3Dfx cards could use 3Dfx's Glide API.
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. It was, however, possible to use the engine's OpenGL renderer, but unfortunately OpenGL support was quite slow and buggy in the original Unreal Engine. Performance in Quake III Arena, a game using an engine more advanced than Unreal Engine 1, was better due to the engine having been designed for OpenGL.
Nvidia's final RIVA 128 drivers for Windows 9x include a full OpenGL driver. However, for this driver to function, Windows must be set with a desktop color depth of 16-bit.
A driver for RIVA 128 is also included in Windows 2000 and XP, but lacks 3D support. A beta driver with OpenGL support was once leaked by Nvidia but was canceled later, and there is no Windows 2000 driver for RIVA 128 on Nvidia's driver site today. Neither the beta driver nor the ones come with Windows 2000/XP could support Direct3D.
Read more about this topic: RIVA 128