Not sure I'd characterize NV3 as a "success". It probably made money, and kept the company above water. But they didn't have a genuinely "successful" product until the TNT shipped in 1998. At this stage, 3dfx completely owned the market, to the extent that lots of notionally "Direct3D" games wouldn't generally run on anything else. NVIDIA and ATI were playing "chase the game with driver updates" on every AAA launch trying to avoid being broken by default.
Which makes it, IMHO, a weird target to try to emulate. NV2 was a real product and sold some units, but it's otherwise more or less forgotten. Like, if you were deciding on a system from the early 70's to research/emulate, would you pick the Data General Nova or the PDP-11?
Ohhh. Actually, quite a lot of NV3s were sold...You can view that just from Nvidia's revenue totals, and reviews at the time. Note the standards for image quality increased very quickly, so it was described as decent in 1997, but awful in 1999.
>standards for image quality increased very quickly
In 1997 as long as game started at all and you could more or less see whats going on it was considered ok and probably not a scam. It was a time of "accelerators" like Matrox with no texturing support, S3 running slower than in fully software mode, with most vendors missing crucial blending modes and filtering.
I owned one, actually. It was very hard to find at retail. ATI still dominated the integrated video card market, with S3 and Matrox and Diamond et. al. filling out the rest. NVIDIA was a notable upstart, and the RIVA actually looked really great on paper. But like I said it couldn't break through the Voodoo's lock on the the game market, nor ATI's control of the OEM channel. It kept the company from failing, but that's about as far as it goes.
Again, a year later the TNT changed things for NVIDIA (and the Geforce 256 a year after that changed everything). But the 128 was forgettable in hindsight.
I don't think the retail sales were very good, there were a lot of them that ended up as OEM cards or on-board (not really integrated at this point) graphics.
Which makes it, IMHO, a weird target to try to emulate. NV2 was a real product and sold some units, but it's otherwise more or less forgotten. Like, if you were deciding on a system from the early 70's to research/emulate, would you pick the Data General Nova or the PDP-11?