NVIDIA is currently worth over $1 trillion, 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 NV1 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 NV1 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 importantly, the fact that they both rendered
quadrilaterals as the basic shape for primitives. But what the heck does that mean?
Well, when a graphics chip 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 NV1's eventual fate.
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 NV1 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 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 NV1's many things in one design
wasn't exactly much of a hit. Its 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 multifunctional
design doesn't matter much if all those functions kind of suck. Despite the NV1'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
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 it ever 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 triangularily, 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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