NVIDIA manufactured the Riva 128 3D graphics chipset. Following several less successful products, it was the first product to gain NVIDIA widespread consumer recognition.

Released in late 1997, the Riva 128 was one of the first generation of consumer 3D chips. At the time, it was viewed as being lower-quality than the industry-leading 3dfx Voodoo chipset, but had the advantage of being a combined 2D/3D graphics chip which did not require a separate 2D card to which to output. This made it a lower-cost solution. It was also relatively high-performance compared to other combined solutions, comparing favorably even to the Voodoo in DirectX benchmarks, but less well in OpenGL due to driver issues. One disadvantage was that at this time many games used 3dfx's proprietary GLide API.

The Riva 128 supported 4MiB of RAM on a 128-bit bus, and like all consumer cards of its generation, had a single pixel pipeline and was limited to a 16-bit (Highcolour) pixel format and a 16-bit Z-buffer in 3D mode.

In early 1998, NVIDIA released a refreshed version, the Riva 128 ZX, which supported up to 8 MiB of memory. The next major chip from NVIDIA would be the Riva TNT.