WEBVTT

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NVIDIA is currently worth over one trillion dollars so it might surprise

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you to know that their first ever product was a total flop this is the nv1

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a chip released all the way back in 1995 as part of a PCI card called The Edge 3D

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from Hardware manufacturer Diamond as you've probably already guessed the nv1

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was an early graphics processor that also included audio processing and

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joystick support back in the mid 90s it wasn't super common to have all these

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functions on one card but NVIDIA believed the convenience of an

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all-in-one solution would make the nv1 a compelling buy but perhaps what made the

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Envy one even more special was the early relationship between NVIDIA and Sega at

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the time Sega wanted to make the games on its spiffy new Saturn console

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available on PC and NVIDIA jumped at the

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chance to make that a reality although the ne1 didn't support common gaming

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apis of the day like opengl and 3dfx's

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glide it did share some common elements with the graphics chip inside the Sega

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Saturn most important only the fact that they both rendered quadrilaterals as the

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basic shape for Primitives but what the heck does that mean well when a graphic

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ship draws a frame of a video game the shapes you see are built up from simple

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polygons in a mesh after this mesh is built textures lighting and other

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effects are applied to create a realistic looking scene but in most

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games triangles serve as the basic polygon building blocks not

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quadrilaterals this might seem like a small distinction but it actually ended

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up being a huge factor in the Envy ones eventual fate and will tell you why

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right after we thank SolidWorks SolidWorks has an inexpensive Cloud

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version for hobbyist and makers alike and 3D experience SolidWorks for makers

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is a package that includes all the design tools you'll need for just 9.99 a

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month you can create anything you can imagine with tools for Designing

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fabricating rendering and more plus free online support and you'll have access to

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an active online community to share with other like-minded makers 3D experience

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SolidWorks for makers is is not for commercial use and limited to two

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thousand dollars USD in profit per year but why not get your feet wet get

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started at the link below back in the mid 90s when I had frosted tips the

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video game industry had not yet settled on one type of polygon as a full-fledged

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industry Norm quadrilaterals or quads were used in the Saturn and the nv1

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because they had some real advantages over triangles they made it a little

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easier to model curved surfaces since a shape with four points can be expressed

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in three dimensions and because developers knew that the Saturn nb1 used

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quads they could account for this when programming textures more specifically

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they helped the Saturn avoid some of the weird texture warping issues that one of

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its main competitors the original PlayStation would eventually become

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infamous for but even with these advantages quads had the major downside

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of being more computationally expensive than the simpler triangles which always

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lay in one plane because of you know the laws of mathematics this inherent

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complexity also made it trickier to map typical game textures onto quads so if

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developers weren't all already coding their games using quadrilaterals they

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didn't have much incentive to do so just so the game would run on the nv1 aside

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from this major architectural issue the

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Envy ones many things in one design wasn't exactly much of a hit it's 2D

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performance an important metric back in 1995 wasn't particularly good and the

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audio capabilities didn't impress either it's like one of those all-in-one

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printers that's painfully taught us that a multi-functional design doesn't matter

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much of all those functions kind of suck despite the Envy one's struggles NVIDIA

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planned to release an improved version called the nv2 but by this time the

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DirectX API basically a software tool for game developers was starting to take

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hold in the market and guess what it was based around triangles rather than quads

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I guess that's kind of a triangle NVIDIA did eventually release DirectX drivers

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for the nv1 but they were slow and buggy basically the drivers were just a

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software emulation layer since the nv1 itself had no actual native Hardware

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support for DirectX this marked the end of any real chance for a graphics chip

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optimized for quads so the nv2 was canned before I never saw the light of

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day and NVIDIA was forced to significantly change its strategy in

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fact the nv2 was pegged for use in the Sega Dreamcast which could render

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triangles or quads but that didn't happen given the nv1's failure and the

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fact that Saturn didn't do so hot in the console space either partly due to the

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Saturn's quad only architecture limiting the platform's appeal for third-party

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developers with all that NVIDIA shifted to a triangle-based architecture for its

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next product the Riva 128 which was focused squarely or triangularly on

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DirectX support the Riva lineup was much more successful and established NVIDIA

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as a legit player in the PC Hardware industry setting the stage for the

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original GeForce chips release in 1999.

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so thanks for watching guys if you like this video hit like hit subscribe and hit us up in the comment section with

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your suggestions for topics that we should cover in the future