The Sega Saturn does not use the NV1, the hardware inside the console predates that chip by quite some time. But, they both make use of quadratic texture mapping.

The NV1 came out a bit early in the 3D acceleration era, around late 1995 and there was not a lot of competition at the time and no Direct3D, so there was lot of experimentation going on. SEGA was looking into porting some of their arcade and Saturn games over to the PC and they figured they might as well support that NV1 chip, since it was probably a little easier to port things over and also because CPUs were still quite slow. Also, they were in pretty good terms with Nvidia, but more on that later. The Nvidia NV1 probably found its way mostly in Pentium 90, 100 and 133 machines, so you can imagine just how slow some of the games ported would run using software rendering on these CPUs.

The NV1 didn't catch on, Direct3D became a thing and did not support the way that card worked, so everyone kind of moved on. SEGA ended up releasing a lot of Direct3D patches for their games and sometimes even newer versions all together. All things considered, I think most of their ports at the time are pretty lousy, especially Daytona USA, Sega Rally and Sega Touring Car Championship. Sega Rally 2 is a shining example, it's pretty much arcade perfect.

Interestingly, as I said earlier, SEGA was in very good terms with Nvidia at the time (1993-1995) which was a brand new company back then. In recent years it has been revealed that they were collaborating on a few projects, one of which was a hardware prototype that was supposed to be released instead of the Saturn, featuring the Nvidia NV2 chip and using cartridges as storage, as direct competition to the Nintendo 64 (then Ultra 64). Negotiations fell through, because this was being worked in the US and Japan was the division that made most of the important decisions. They still worked together with the NV1 ports on Windows, but when that chip failed, Nvidia scrapped the NV2 and moved on to the NV3 which was named the Riva128. And the rest is history as they say grinning face...

F2bnp wrote:

The Sega Saturn does not use the NV1, the hardware inside the console predates that chip by quite some time. But, they both make […]
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The Sega Saturn does not use the NV1, the hardware inside the console predates that chip by quite some time. But, they both make use of quadratic texture mapping.

The NV1 came out a bit early in the 3D acceleration era, around late 1995 and there was not a lot of competition at the time and no Direct3D, so there was lot of experimentation going on. SEGA was looking into porting some of their arcade and Saturn games over to the PC and they figured they might as well support that NV1 chip, since it was probably a little easier to port things over and also because CPUs were still quite slow. Also, they were in pretty good terms with Nvidia, but more on that later. The Nvidia NV1 probably found its way mostly in Pentium 90, 100 and 133 machines, so you can imagine just how slow some of the games ported would run using software rendering on these CPUs.

The NV1 didn't catch on, Direct3D became a thing and did not support the way that card worked, so everyone kind of moved on. SEGA ended up releasing a lot of Direct3D patches for their games and sometimes even newer versions all together. All things considered, I think most of their ports at the time are pretty lousy, especially Daytona USA, Sega Rally and Sega Touring Car Championship. Sega Rally 2 is a shining example, it's pretty much arcade perfect.

Interestingly, as I said earlier, SEGA was in very good terms with Nvidia at the time (1993-1995) which was a brand new company back then. In recent years it has been revealed that they were collaborating on a few projects, one of which was a hardware prototype that was supposed to be released instead of the Saturn, featuring the Nvidia NV2 chip and using cartridges as storage, as direct competition to the Nintendo 64 (then Ultra 64). Negotiations fell through, because this was being worked in the US and Japan was the division that made most of the important decisions. They still worked together with the NV1 ports on Windows, but when that chip failed, Nvidia scrapped the NV2 and moved on to the NV3 which was named the Riva128. And the rest is history as they say grinning face...

Very interesting. I know Sega of America was also attempting to negotiate a deal with SGI before they went to Nintendo, but Sega of Japan just wouldn't budge, preferring the somewhat xenophobic policy of using Japanese technology. One of the many things that hurt the Saturn in the end.

They reversed that in time for the Dreamcast, but by then the long-term damage to their console business had already been done.

Yes, that's also true. I believe the NV2 based console was first revealed around 2005-2006 when some people started interviewing devs that worked on the ill-fated Sonic X-treme, a game that jumped many different platforms, one of them being that NV2 console grinning face.

Didn't quite reverse it. For the dreamcast Sega of America was talking to 3dfx, but SoJ eventually settled for PowerVR for the graphics chip.

I remember seeing packs of nv1 + Saturn controller + Virtua Fighter and Nights for sale when I was a kid. Always wanted one but was so disappointed by Sega's post-Genesis record that I didn't even bother my parents.

slivercr wrote:

Nights

Game Nights? more details please, also interesting.

Thanks for answers, great explanation. =)

Nights into dreams.

Not just quadratic texture mapping, they use full-on quads for everything (as opposed to triangles like the rest of the world). Quadratic texture mapping is something you can do easier on a quad. Quads are not good though (unless you want to draw a quad), vertices are not neccesarily co-polanr... uh-oh... and while you can draw triangles using quads (setting two of the vertices to be the same POSE), this could screw with the interpolation (mapping) and is effectively a waste of vertex in your pipe.

slivercr wrote:

Didn't quite reverse it. For the dreamcast Sega of America was talking to 3dfx, but SoJ eventually settled for PowerVR for the graphics chip.

Well, PowerVR is made by a British company.

Reputator wrote:

Well, PowerVR is made by a British company.

What I meant was SoJ still had firm grasp over all hardware related decisions, regardless of any suggestion from SoA. I don't know if it was a xenophobic decision for the Saturn, in any case. More cultural/circumstantial than anything else. But that's another discussion.

Reputator wrote:

slivercr wrote:

Didn't quite reverse it. For the dreamcast Sega of America was talking to 3dfx, but SoJ eventually settled for PowerVR for the graphics chip.

Well, PowerVR is made by a British company.

......which had a deal with NEC, a japanese company with a strong brand (especially in Japan where they were a dominant force in the PC market). Sega of Japan licensed it through them.

leileilol wrote:

......which had a deal with NEC, a japanese company with a strong brand (especially in Japan where they were a dominant force in the PC market). Sega of Japan licensed it through them.

Well, nevermind then. They refused to work with companies outside of Japan. At least they were working with foreign IP though.

No the Saturn uses two video chipset, VDP1 & VDP2, VDP1 dose textures and quadrilateral polygons wile VDP2 does backgrounds.
If I recall the chips were made by sega.
NV1 did use Quadrilateral polygons rendering witch made porting Saturn games to the PC much simpler, but I never got why sega ported the games this way. You would think porting games from the sega model 2 would be less work given it used a i960 and not the mess of cpu's/gpu's the Saturn had.

Probably because the Model 2 was a beast back then and PCs just couldn't do those games justice unless they were made less demanding, which the Saturn versions already did. So, it made sense to port the Saturn versions instead of the arcade games.

The VDP chips were indeed designed by SEGA AFAIK.

I messed around with NV1 years ago. I made some Youtube videos of NASCAR, Panzer Dragoon and Virtua Fighter. It's like Matrox Mystique in that you wonder if the card's actually doing anything because it just looks like fairly typical ~640x480 software 3D rendering. The 2MB cards also aren't so great and can stutter if you don't set the details to a lower level.

I think there are in fact some Direct3D drivers for it but they are fairly useless because it just doesn't have the right hardware featureset to do it well. And again at best it looks like a software rendered game of the mid-90s.

The 2D DOS / GUI portion isn't super great and has some speed and compatibility issues.

And of course it has sound too, including wavetable MIDI. Not awful but you can do a lot better.

I always liked the Saturn "complex" architecture that wasn't probably enough pushed back in those times. Also the 32X expansion was interesting considering the amount of processors that ran into it together with the original Genesis cpu/vdp.

Reputator wrote:

leileilol wrote:

......which had a deal with NEC, a japanese company with a strong brand (especially in Japan where they were a dominant force in the PC market). Sega of Japan licensed it through them.

Well, nevermind then. They refused to work with companies outside of Japan. At least they were working with foreign IP though.

From what I heard it wasn't exactly a "Japan or burst" decision, talks with 3DFX were very advanced and on the same level as those with NEC... till 3DFX used the possible agreement with Sega as part of a press release for investors; taking into account that the fact that Sega was already developing a new console was top secret at the moment it doesn't go very well with SoJ, who decided to cancel all negotiations with 3DFX.

I always liked the Saturn "complex" architecture that wasn't probably enough pushed back in those times

PowerVR solution was probably better anyway.

386SX wrote:

I always liked the Saturn "complex" architecture that wasn't probably enough pushed back in those times

It's comparable to PS3 situation, but I doubt it had enough potential to really compete with PS1 or N64 hardware in terms of 3D performance.

Fairly recently there was a big thread at Beyond3D discussing Saturn.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/questions- … a-saturn.58086/

swaaye wrote:

Fairly recently there was a big thread at Beyond3D discussing Saturn.
https://forum.beyond3d.com/threads/questions- … a-saturn.58086/

Cheers for this...phew, that was a read and a half o.0. I always heard the saturn was a 2D console, 3D being an after thought. What a headfsk of a system going on there. Funny how it was marketed as "Arcade at home", personally I don't think that the "3D Arcade at home" experience was nailed by Sega until Dreamcast (2D Arcade at home == neogeo!).

Genesis early on was also all about the "arcade experience" as well, which isn't really surprising given what SEGA is and was before the whole console business.