The History Of Nvidia GPUs (Archive)

[Ryan_210]

The Sega Saturn did not use Nvidia's NV1 chip in any way. Saturn was comprised of twin Hitachi SH-2 CPUs and Sega's custom VDP1, VDP2 for 2D graphics, along with a host of other chips from Hitachi and Yamaha. Sega of Japan started developing Saturn in 1992, before Nvidia even existed. The Diamond Edge 3D card with Nvidia's NV1 did have Sega Saturn controller ports, and there were a handful of Saturn games ported to the NV1 for PC.

It's kinda annoying to see misinformation with regard to Sega Saturn and NV1. They used pretty much the same technique for rendering 3D, quadratic texture mapping, but in no way did they have the same silicon.

 

[bit_user]

The Sega Saturn did not use Nvidia's NV1 chip in any way. Saturn was comprised of twin Hitachi SH-2 CPUs and Sega's custom VDP1, VDP2 for 2D graphics, along with a host of other chips from Hitachi and Yamaha. Sega of Japan started developing Saturn in 1992, before Nvidia even existed.

...

It's kinda annoying to see misinformation with regard to Sega Saturn and NV1. They used pretty much the same technique for rendering 3D, quadratic texture mapping, but in no way did they have the same silicon.

Perhaps the issue was further confused by Sega's early investments in Nvidia. They had reportedly planned to use the NV2 in Dreamcast, but the chip was cancelled when Nvidia finally accepted that the world didn't want its quadratic patches.

 

[ragnarok94]

I'd really like to see an article on GPU/CPU combos used in consoles and older computers til present...anyone else?

 

[bit_user]

I'd really like to see an article on GPU/CPU combos used in consoles and older computers til present...anyone else?

Sure, if it had a few tidbits about what kinds of limitations developers frequently ran up against or had to creatively work around. This would make the article worth reading, for me. It needs more than just a recitation of the various chips, their clock speeds, and word-lengths (which will undoubtedly be a contentious issue, especially if the x86 article is anything to go by).

BTW, you can probably get a lot of detail on your favorite consoles, at Wikipedia. Many have dedicated entries on just the hardware, itself.

 

[burtman88]

One thing that bothered me in this, They left out the 7950 GX2 the first dual gpu video card they made for nvidia. Loved these cards had them in sli so four Gpus. They were great till capacitor popped and video card set on fire in my pc. I was sent 2 8800 gtxs and free replacements.