michaelleung: I miss my old Riva 128. Good times.
I had one of the first models of that card from Diamond Multimedia. It was the 4MB PCI version before the AGP's ever existed. If I'm not mistaken, STB Velocity was the first to get their AGP riva 128 to market - so I had that one as well.
It was the first chipset to dethrone 3DFX as the Quake killer (max fps). Although their OpenGL driver was in Alpha stage forever - no gamma/brightness. I remember having to hang blankets over my office windows and jack the monitor brightness wide open to see anything in Quake. This was back in the days of everyone running MCD (mini-client) OpenGL drivers.
Ever since the riva 128, I pretty much ran a nvidia based chipset with voodoo add in boards - for the best of both worlds - glide and direct3d.
For voodoo's, I had the Diamond Monster 3D 4MB voodoo 1. After that I held out until the 12MB voodoo 2 came and then bought 2 of those on release day (at $300 USD a piece) to run in SLI. Creative Labs was the first to get their 12MB voodoo2 boards to market so I had 2 of those. That's still one of my more memorable hardware purchases to date.
I always felt 3DFX "blew their wad" with the voodoo 2. I wasn't a big fan of their hardware after that. By the time the Quake 3 engine came around, that 16 bit color and 256X256 texture limitation of 3dfx's with the voodoo3 became painfully obvious. By the time they supported better quality video, it was too late - grossly overpriced hardware that performed inferior to Nvidia's.
As for ATI, they really didn't become a serious contender in 3d until around the 9700 pro days.