1995 computer graphics card
Nvidia NV1 / STG2000
The original Nvidia logo
|
Release date
| November 7, 1995
; 28 years ago
(
1995-11-07
)
May 22, 1995
; 28 years ago
(
1995-05-22
)
[1]
[
non-primary source needed
]
|
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Codename
| NV1
|
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DirectX
| None
|
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|
Successor
| RIVA 128
|
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|
Unsupported
|
The
Nvidia
NV1
, manufactured by
SGS-Thomson Microelectronics
under the model name
STG2000
, was a multimedia
PCI
card announced in May 1995 and released in November 1995.
[2]
It was sold to retail by
Diamond
as the
Diamond Edge 3D
.
The NV1 featured a complete
2D
/
3D
graphics core based upon
quadratic texture mapping
,
VRAM
or
FPM DRAM
memory, an integrated 32-channel 350
MIPS
playback-only sound card, and a
Sega Saturn
-compatible joypad port. As such, it was intended to replace the 2D graphics card,
Sound Blaster
-compatible audio systems, and 15-pin
joystick ports
, then prevalent on
IBM PC
compatibles.
Putting all of this functionality on a single card led to significant compromises, and the NV1 was not very successful in the market. A modified version, the NV2, was developed in partnership with
Sega
for the
Sega Dreamcast
, but ultimately dropped.
[
citation needed
]
Nvidia's next stand-alone product, the
RIVA 128
, focussed entirely on 2D and 3D performance and was much more successful.
History
[
edit
]
Several Sega Saturn games saw NV1-compatible conversions on the PC such as
Panzer Dragoon
and
Virtua Fighter Remix
. However, the NV1 struggled in a market place full of several competing proprietary standards, and was marginalized by emerging triangle
polygon
-based 2D/3D accelerators such as the low-cost
S3 Graphics ViRGE
,
Matrox
Mystique,
ATI Rage
, and
Rendition Verite V1000
among other early entrants. It ultimately did not sell well, despite being a promising and interesting device.
[
peacock prose
]
NV1's biggest initial problem was its cost and overall quality. Although it offered credible 3D performance, its use of quadratic surfaces was not popular, and was quite different than typical polygon rendering. The audio portion of the card received merely acceptable reviews, with the
General MIDI
receiving lukewarm responses at best (a critical component at the time due to the superior sound quality produced by competing products). The Sega Saturn console was a market failure compared to Sony's
PlayStation
or Sega's earlier
Sega Genesis
, and so the unique and somewhat limiting support of these gamepads was of limited benefit.
Nvidia
, by integrating all of these usually separate components, raised their costs considerably above what they would have been if the card had been designed solely for 3D acceleration.
During the NV1's release timeframe, the transition from
VLB
/
ISA
(
486s
) to PCI (
Pentiums
and late model 486 boards) was taking place, and games often used
MIDI
for music because PCs were still generally incapable of large-scale digital audio playback due to storage and processing power limitations. Reaching for the best music and sound quality, and flexibility with
MS-DOS
audio standards, often required 2 sound cards be used, or a sound card with a MIDI
daughtercard
connector. Additionally, NV1's 2D speed and quality were not competitive with many of the high-end systems available at the time, especially the critical-for-games DOS graphics speed. Many customers were simply not interested in replacing their often-elaborate system setups with an expensive all-in-one board and so the heavy integration of NV1 hurt sales simply through inconvenience.
Market interest in the product quickly ended when
Microsoft
announced the
DirectX
specifications, based upon triangle polygon rendering. This release by Microsoft of a major industry-backed
API
that was generally incompatible with NV1 ended Nvidia's hopes of market leadership immediately. While demos of quadratic rendered round spheres looked good, experience had proved working with quadratic texture maps was extremely difficult. Even calculating simple routines was problematic. Nvidia did manage to put together limited Direct3D support, but it was slow and buggy (software-based), and no match for the native triangle polygon hardware on the market.
[3]
Subsequent NV1 quadratic-related development continued internally as the NV2.
NV2 was to be NVIDIA's second PC
3D accelerator
graphics chip, but it was cancelled before completion. It was planned to succeed the NV1.
NV2 built upon its predecessor's unusual quadratic 3D-rendering architecture. It was initially considered for use in Sega's Dreamcast console, due to the relationship cultivated between NVidia and Sega over the porting of Sega arcade and Saturn console titles over to the PC platform, where the similarity in NV1's and Saturn's 3D-rendering architecture aided in the porting process. (The NV1 graphics cards had 2 Sega Saturn gamepad ports integrated so that Saturn titles could be easily ported over to the NV1 cards and have an equal gameplay experience.) However, experience with both Saturn and NV1's 3D-rendering architecture in the Saturn ultimately led the company to abandon quadratic 3D-rendering architecture altogether, in favor of a more traditional architecture that operated on
triangle primitives
.
[4]
NVIDIA's strong desire to stick with their maturing quadratic
forward texture mapping
technology was a great cause of friction between Sega and NVIDIA. One part of the equation was undoubtedly that Sega's PC games division. A quadratic 3D
game engine
would be very difficult to port over to just about any other contemporary 3D graphics hardware, all of which used triangle primitives and
inverse-texture mapping
. More importantly, although consumer 3D hardware was still in its infancy, there was general consensus within the industry that triangle primitives with inverse-texture mapping would be standard going forward. Sega ultimately selected
NEC
/
VideoLogic's
PowerVR
2 to power the 3d-graphics in its Dreamcast console.
[5]
Because the demand was not there from Sega, and the PC market had drastically changed direction away from QTM due to the popularity of the triangle polygon-based
OpenGL
and
DirectX
, NVIDIA abandoned further development of the NV2 and started on a new architecture, a.k.a. "NV3" or
RIVA 128
.
Supported games
[
edit
]
References
[
edit
]
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Software and technologies
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Multimedia acceleration
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Software
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Technologies
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GPU microarchitectures
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