NVIDIA is currently worth over one trillion dollars so it might surprise
you to know that their first ever product was a total flop this is the nv1
a chip released all the way back in 1995 as part of a PCI card called The Edge 3D
from Hardware manufacturer Diamond as you've probably already guessed the nv1
was an early graphics processor that also included audio processing and
joystick support back in the mid 90s it wasn't super common to have all these
functions on one card but NVIDIA believed the convenience of an
all-in-one solution would make the nv1 a compelling buy but perhaps what made the
Envy one even more special was the early relationship between NVIDIA and Sega at
the time Sega wanted to make the games on its spiffy new Saturn console
available on PC and NVIDIA jumped at the
chance to make that a reality although the ne1 didn't support common gaming
apis of the day like opengl and 3dfx's
glide it did share some common elements with the graphics chip inside the Sega
Saturn most important only the fact that they both rendered quadrilaterals as the
basic shape for Primitives but what the heck does that mean well when a graphic
ship draws a frame of a video game the shapes you see are built up from simple
polygons in a mesh after this mesh is built textures lighting and other
effects are applied to create a realistic looking scene but in most
games triangles serve as the basic polygon building blocks not
quadrilaterals this might seem like a small distinction but it actually ended
up being a huge factor in the Envy ones eventual fate and will tell you why
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started at the link below back in the mid 90s when I had frosted tips the
video game industry had not yet settled on one type of polygon as a full-fledged
industry Norm quadrilaterals or quads were used in the Saturn and the nv1
because they had some real advantages over triangles they made it a little
easier to model curved surfaces since a shape with four points can be expressed
in three dimensions and because developers knew that the Saturn nb1 used
quads they could account for this when programming textures more specifically
they helped the Saturn avoid some of the weird texture warping issues that one of
its main competitors the original PlayStation would eventually become
infamous for but even with these advantages quads had the major downside
of being more computationally expensive than the simpler triangles which always
lay in one plane because of you know the laws of mathematics this inherent
complexity also made it trickier to map typical game textures onto quads so if
developers weren't all already coding their games using quadrilaterals they
didn't have much incentive to do so just so the game would run on the nv1 aside
from this major architectural issue the
Envy ones many things in one design wasn't exactly much of a hit it's 2D
performance an important metric back in 1995 wasn't particularly good and the
audio capabilities didn't impress either it's like one of those all-in-one
printers that's painfully taught us that a multi-functional design doesn't matter
much of all those functions kind of suck despite the Envy one's struggles NVIDIA
planned to release an improved version called the nv2 but by this time the
DirectX API basically a software tool for game developers was starting to take
hold in the market and guess what it was based around triangles rather than quads
I guess that's kind of a triangle NVIDIA did eventually release DirectX drivers
for the nv1 but they were slow and buggy basically the drivers were just a
software emulation layer since the nv1 itself had no actual native Hardware
support for DirectX this marked the end of any real chance for a graphics chip
optimized for quads so the nv2 was canned before I never saw the light of
day and NVIDIA was forced to significantly change its strategy in
fact the nv2 was pegged for use in the Sega Dreamcast which could render
triangles or quads but that didn't happen given the nv1's failure and the
fact that Saturn didn't do so hot in the console space either partly due to the
Saturn's quad only architecture limiting the platform's appeal for third-party
developers with all that NVIDIA shifted to a triangle-based architecture for its
next product the Riva 128 which was focused squarely or triangularly on
DirectX support the Riva lineup was much more successful and established NVIDIA
as a legit player in the PC Hardware industry setting the stage for the
original GeForce chips release in 1999.
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