Quad Texture Maps, bad

1995: The launch of the NV1

As we mentioned in our History of NVIDIA article, the NV1 was NVIDIA's first chip and was considered to be ahead of its time in many regards. Specifically, the NV1 was novel in that it integrated audio and I/O processing on a single chip along with video. While integrated solutions may not have been appealing on the PC, this was perfect for the console, as a highly integrated part would keep costs low.

Sega hoped that it could get NVIDIA to tweak the NV1's 3D architecture for its console needs, allowing the company to take advantage of the chip's low-cost graphics with integrated audio and I/O processing. A high level deal was made between NVIDIA and Sega of Japan involving approximately 7 million dollars in investment capital.

Interestingly enough, the upper management at Sega had been so mesmerized by the possibilities of integration that the deal was signed before the NV1 was actually released to retail, before Sega even knew what NVIDIA's idea of 3D was.

More quads!

The NV1 was technologically superior to other chips of that era from two perspectives: audio and I/O. Unfortunately, the quadratic texture maps were not so appealing, and outside of NVIDIA, no one believed in quadratic texture maps -not even Sega.

The NV1 used forward-rendered quads, which was essentially what the Saturn had done, and was exactly what developers hated most about the Saturn. Now NVIDIA was trying to convince Sega that it was still a good approach. The tech demos of round spheres always looked nice, but in real-world games, working with quadratic texture maps was horrendous. Even simple things such as collision detection become very difficult.

Back to the storyline

At this time (1995-1996), NVIDIA was still a fledgling startup with approximately 30 employees and NVIDIA's Chief Technical Officer, Curtis Priem, was enamored by quadratic texture maps. As CTO, he made quadratic texture maps the standard at NVIDIA.

Shortly after executives at Sega and NVIDIA had signed the deal, Sega programming legend Yu Suzuki entered the scene. Although the original contract had already been signed at high-levels, the arcade manufacturing groups had a great deal of influence over what chip was going to be used in the next console, but despite their power, the AM groups did not see the console as their core market or concern. While Sega had its ups and downs in the home market competing against the likes of Nintendo and later Sony, its arcade division traditionally did very well. Indeed, although Capcom's Street Fighter II was the most popular arcade game in the world since Pac-Man, Sega's Virtua Fighter actually had a lead in Japan for a short time.

Suzuki-san, head of Sega's flagship AM2 division, assigned one of his best graphics people to interface with NVIDIA in the US. Although we do not have this engineer's name, we know that he had previously interfaced with Real3D in the past, and, from outside reports, had an exceptional understanding of 3D graphics techniques and rendering pipelines. Most importantly, he knew exactly what the AM software development groups at Sega needed in a graphics chip, namely triangles.

Meetings were held to discuss the rendering primitive for the NV2. Sega pushed for real triangle acceleration to be included in the NV2, but NVIDIA did not comply. NVIDIA insisted that time was better allocated developing the quadratic texture map portion of the NV2 and adapting existing triangle-based development tools such as 3D modelers to QTMs.