NV2

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NV2 was to be NVIDIA's second graphics processor designed for consumer PC 3D accelerator add-in boards. It was never completed.

[edit] Overview

The design was also part of Sega's early efforts for a successor to the Saturn, but was not actually for Dreamcast because Dreamcast was designed later without Nvidia technology. NV2 was to have a similar architecture to NVIDIA's NV1 chip. NVIDIA grew closer to Sega after production of the NV1 and the NV1 graphics cards even had 2 Sega Saturn gamepad ports integrated so that Saturn titles could be easily ported over to the NV1 cards and have an equal gameplay experience.

Unfortunately, Sega's opinion of quadratic rendering became tarnished because of challenges with Saturn development, and because game developers close to the company expressed that polygon rendering was the way to go for the future.^[1] NVIDIA's strong desire to stick with their maturing quadratic technology was a great cause of friction between Sega and NVIDIA. One part of the equation was undoubtedly that Sega's PC games division was growing at this time and a quadratic 3D game engine would be very difficult to port over to a Direct3D accelerator. Porting their console and arcade games to PC was an easy way to increase sales of a title, assuming development costs for the cross-platform port could be kept to a minimum. Suddenly NV2's chances of becoming the next console chip for Sega vanished and the PC 3D world was definitely entrenched in polygons by this time.

NV2 was never finished, although partially functional silicon had been completed. Because the demand was not there from Sega, and the PC market had drastically changed direction away from QTM due to the popularity of the polygon-based OpenGL and DirectX, NVIDIA abandoned further development and moved on to their full Direct3D accelerator, a.k.a. "NV3" or RIVA 128.

[edit] References

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