NV1 was released in 1995 and sold to retail as the Diamond Edge. It featured a complete 2D/3D graphics core based upon quadratic surfaces, VRAM memory, with an integrated 32 channel 350-MIPS audio playback only soundcard.

Because the Sega Saturn was also based upon forward-rendered quads, several Saturn games were converted to NV1 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.

Market interest in the product quickly ended when Microsoft announced the Direct-X specifications, based upon polygons. This was the correct technical decision. While demos of quadratic rendered round spheres looked good, experience had proved working with quadratic texture maps was extremely difficult. Even calculating simple routines such as collision detection was problematic.

Subsequently NV1 development continued internally as the NV2. The SEGA Saturn had an excessive number of discrete chips, making manufacturing difficult and expensive. Because Sega were desperate to fix this for their next console, they reportedly paid nVidia several millions of dollars to develop an integrated video/audio chip for their console, before the NV1 had even been finished. The NV2 was not adopted for the final Sega Dreamcast spec.

External links

• 7 Years of Graphics
• 1995: The launch of the NV1