Sega to port Saturn titles to Nvidia boards

Electronic News, July 31, 1995 by Anthony Cataldo

REDWOOD CITY, CALIF.--Sega of America, here, will port its 32-bit Saturn system game titles to add-in boards equipped with multimedia cards based on Nvidia architecture due out this Christmas, providing a crucial software development pipeline for the SGS-Thomson-backed startup.

The NV1 chip won Sega's blessing because it met four key guideposts that guarantee the Sega games will maintain the same visual quality and responsiveness as they would being played on a console system, a Sega spokeswoman said. The NV1 device provides the 3-D rendering, audio and video playback as well as support for Sega game controllers. "Games belong on the TV set, but we also believe that the PC is a valid platform when the technology gets there. Our goal has always been to bring our titles to a viable platform."

Until now, Sega has largely steered away from PC title deployment because the quality of PC game play generally wasn't up to par with console systems. But Sega has recently shown a strong interest in moving to the PC platform, evidenced by a recent deal to bundle Sega's Sonic CD games to Native Signal Processing-capable PCs.

Sega, which has more than 100 third-party title developers for its Saturn system, said it intends to release one or two titles for NV1-based boards by Christmas. Future games will be available for the Saturn console first before being ported to Nvidia-based cards, while certain games--particularly those made for multiple players--will probably not make it to the PC, the spokeswoman said.

So far, Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Diamond Multimedia Systems and Taiwan-based Lead Tech have announced that they will make add-in boards based on the NV1. Boards are expected to be priced starting at $249 at the low end, moving up to $399.

The NV1 is being manufactured by SGS-Thomson, which also has the rights to sell a DRAM-based version under its own brand name. Nvidia is focusing on the high-end market with its VRAM-enabled version.

The expected release of Windows 95 next month will also spur the PC games market because of its Direct X software tools, said Robert A. Csongor, Nvidia's director of strategic and product marketing.

"Windows 95 has hooks and APIs for audio, graphics, 3-D, a new type of input and video," he said. "You need to have a solution to accelerate all of those; the NV1 maps directly onto that."

Introduced in May, the NV1 features GUI acceleration, wavetable synthesis audio, real-time 3-D rendering with video texturing, video acceleration and a digital game port. Supporting both PCI and VL buses, the device also enables concurrent media processing and synchronization.

The device's ability to accelerate 3-D graphics is its hallmark feature, Mr. Csongor said. To cut down the number of computations to render a 3-D image, Nvidia uses bilinear and quadratic texture mapping, a technique the company claims reduces the number of floating point operations 50-fold and allows better manipulation of curved surfaces than drawing large numbers of triangles.

More than 20 chip firms--including 3Dlabs, Cirrus Logic and S3--are preparing to pepper the market with 3-D devices made for the home PC games market, surpassing the number of VGA controller vendors in existence today, according to Fred Dunn, VP of market research firm Jon Peddie Associates, Tiburon, Calif.

"There's a rush from the vendor community to get 3-D boards to market, and content will sell the boards," Mr. Dunn said. He said Nvidia will get a needed boost from the deal because of Sega's prominence in the games market.

What could potentially hurt the Nvidia chip, however, is its lack of color space conversion and scaling capabilities, which are now common features used to help play back compressed video formats such as MPEG.

"That seems to be a gaping hole in their design," Mr. Dunn said. "I tend to think that it would be useful to have it on the chip since it does have VGA and everything else on there."

But Mr. Csongor said color space conversion and scaling are not needed to achieve good quality, 30 frames per second video playback, because the NV1 has the horsepower to allow it to be done in software.

"For a solution that doesn't have a (Direct Memory Access) engine in it, it would be more important," Mr. Csongor said. "We built in the DMA engine that takes care of the task of bursting data in and out of memory, so we can do 30 frames per second at 1,024-by-768 and with good quality."