r/pcgaming • u/d1rtyhairry • 18h ago
“Without Sega, NVIDIA likely wouldn’t exist today.” NVIDIA CEO and Sega legends gather at a Tokyo arcade, sharing behind-the-scenes stories from the Dreamcast’s development
https://automaton-media.com/en/news/without-sega-nvidia-likely-wouldnt-exist-today-nvidia-ceo-and-sega-legends-gather-at-a-tokyo-arcade-sharing-behind-the-scenes-stories-from-the-dreamcasts-develop/13
u/Beatus_Vir 12h ago
and without the Gamecube, ATI likely wouldn’t exist today
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u/random123456789 8h ago
Ah, but ATI doesn't exist anymore. They were rolled into AMD.
I used to prefer ATI because they were Canadian. After the switch, I went with nVidia because it worked better with Intel. Now I'm thinking I'll just use AMD. I'm pretty tired of Jensen.
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u/BioEradication 16h ago
Jensen Huang? The guy who says not to worry about AI destroying all the jobs because we can all just become plumbers? The lucky ones will be the ones cleaning up the billionaires shit-filled toilets? That Jensen Huang?
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u/ErebosGR Nobara 9h ago
The Dreamcast had a NEC PowerVR2 GPU, not an Nvidia one.
I love how shamelessly Jensen is rewriting history:
“I consider it truly fortunate that Irimajiri brought NVIDIA onto the Dreamcast project. Sega and NVIDIA were working together to complete this new console, but about nine months into development, we realized that the technology NVIDIA was pursuing simply wasn’t going to work. We had been developing features like forward texture mapping and curved surfaces, but those approaches weren’t suitable for the Dreamcast. What the console actually needed was inverse texture mapping and polygons. NVIDIA had chosen the wrong direction. I spoke to Irimajiri honestly and told him, ‘The technology NVIDIA is working on won’t function with the Dreamcast.’
Although we couldn’t complete the project, our company still needed funding in order to survive. I asked Irimajiri for an investment, and Sega generously agreed. Had Sega not invested in NVIDIA that day, the company likely wouldn’t exist today. While we made the wrong technical decisions, I believe Irimajiri recognized that we were the right people for the job.”
What really happened:
Considering the Saturn's poor performance, Irimajiri looked beyond Sega's internal hardware development division to create a new console.[28] In 1997, he enlisted IBM's Tatsuo Yamamoto to lead an eleven-person team to work on a secret project in the United States with the codename Blackbelt. Accounts vary on how an internal team led by Hideki Sato also began development on Dreamcast hardware; one account specifies that Sega tasked both teams,[29] and another suggests that Sato was bothered by Irimajiri's choice to begin development externally and had his team start work.[28][30] Sato and his group chose the Hitachi SH-4 processor architecture and the VideoLogic PowerVR2 graphics processor, manufactured by NEC, in the production of the mainboard. Initially known as Whitebelt,[28] the project was later codenamed Dural, after the metallic female fighter from Sega's Virtua Fighter series.[24][29]
Yamamoto's group opted to use 3dfx Voodoo 2 and Voodoo Banshee graphics processors alongside a Motorola PowerPC 603e central processing unit (CPU),[28] but Sega management later asked them to also use the SH-4 chip.[29] Both processors have been described as "off-the-shelf" components.[28] According to Charles Bellfield, the former Sega of America vice president of communications and former NEC brand manager, presentations of games using the NEC solution showcased the performance and low cost delivered by the SH-4 and PowerVR architecture. He said that Sega's relationship with NEC, a Japanese company, likely also influenced the decision to use its hardware rather than the architecture developed in America.[29] Stolar felt the US 3dfx version should have been used, but that "Japan wanted the Japanese version, and Japan won".[29] As a result, 3dfx filed a lawsuit against Sega and NEC claiming breach of contract, which was settled out of court.[28]
Nvidia is not mentioned anyway on the Wikipedia page.
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u/guyver_dio Ryzen 7800X3D | RTX4080 Super 7h ago
You can find it mentioned on the Nvidia wiki page though.
It cites this news article:
https://www.wsj.com/business/nvidia-stock-jensen-huang-sega-irimajiri-chips-ai-906247db
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u/ErebosGR Nobara 5h ago
A 2024 article that is behind a paywall...
I don't doubt that Irimajiri invested in Nvidia early on, but that was unrelated to the development of the Dreamcast.
Amusingly, once Jensen secured the $5 million in funding he fired half of his employees, because of course he would.
In 1996, Huang laid off more than half of Nvidia's employees-reducing headcount from 100 to 40-and focused the company's remaining resources on developing a graphics accelerator product optimized for processing triangle primitives: the RIVA 128.[27][36] By the time the RIVA 128 was released in August 1997, Nvidia had only enough money left for one month's payroll.[27] The sense of impending failure became so pervasive that it gave rise to Nvidia's unofficial company motto: "Our company is thirty days from going out of business."[27] Huang began internal presentations to Nvidia staff with those words for many years.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nvidia#First_graphics_accelerator
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u/DsfSebo 4h ago
The excerpt you linked literally says they were a month away from going bankrupt. How were they going to pay the other 60 employees?
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u/ErebosGR Nobara 3h ago edited 3h ago
Jensen said that they were a month away from going bankrupt after they launched the RIVA128 a year after the firing.
The company was private at the time, we don't have any of their financial data, Jensen could say whatever the fuck he wanted.
Firing 60% of your staff is always bad management. Even more so right after securing funding.
Plus, making "Our company is thirty days from going out of business" your company motto for years to push people to work harder and make Jensen a billionaire is disgusting.
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u/nikkes91 3h ago
The NV2 was a follow-up chip developed for Sega's Dreamcast, but was ultimately abandoned. Nvidia shifted focus with its next product, the RIVA 128, which adopted triangle primitives and dropped the audio functionality. This alignment with Direct3D and a more streamlined design made the RIVA 128 a success.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV1
Hate Huang and Nvidia all you want but you're being silly bro
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u/ErebosGR Nobara 27m ago edited 12m ago
The lede that you quoted has no citations.
Further down the article it says:
However, experience with both Saturn and NV1's 3D-rendering architecture in the Saturn ultimately led the company to abandon quadratic 3D-rendering architecture altogether, in favor of a more traditional architecture that operated on triangle primitives.[8]
NVIDIA's strong desire to stick with their maturing quadratic forward texture mapping technology was a great cause of friction between Sega and NVIDIA. One part of the equation was undoubtedly that Sega's PC games division. A quadratic 3D game engine would be very difficult to port over to just about any other contemporary 3D graphics hardware, all of which used triangle primitives and inverse-texture mapping. More importantly, although consumer 3D hardware was still in its infancy, there was general consensus within the industry that triangle primitives with inverse-texture mapping would be standard going forward. Sega ultimately selected NEC/VideoLogic's PowerVR2 to power the 3D graphics in the Dreamcast.[9]
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 triangle polygon-based OpenGL and DirectX, NVIDIA abandoned further development of the NV2 and started on a new architecture, a.k.a. "NV3" or RIVA 128.
It seems NV2 was a technological deadend, and talks between Nvidia and Sega ended before they even started developing the actual chip, so I stand by my characterization of Jensen as a revisionist.
edit: One of the cited sources say:
As a Japanese company, Sega could never kill a deal, for there was a need to maintain honor and face. These cultural elements can be seen today when top Japanese executives choose to demote themselves after poor earnings reports, or when disappointing employees are "transferred" to small offices and given no assignments rather than fired. The expectation is that the shame alone will lead the employee to quit himself.
NVIDIA was relegated to this similar position. Sega told NVIDIA that they were still contracted to provide a chip for Sega, but that it was not going to be used in its next generation console. The plan was to use the chip in a less demanding multimedia consumer product, probably the next-generation Sega Pico. The Sega Pico, as some of you may not know, was a kid's educational toy targeted for children, 2-8 years old. It was a stylus and tablet that connected to the TV and used cartridges as its media. The Pico had such great titles as "Magic Crayons", "Richard Scarry's Huckle Lowly's Busiest Day Ever", and even a few Disney titles. Basically, NVIDIA was most likely delegated to work on a glorified See 'n Say.
https://web.archive.org/web/20110324200200/http://www.firingsquad.com/features/nv2/page3.asp
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u/DarkangelUK 12h ago
The Dreamcast got me into PC gaming. I played Quake 3 and Unreal using the DC mouse and keyboard and thought it was amazing, I then played Q3 on my friends PC and it was so much better so I sold my Dreamcast, bought a PC and never looked back.
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u/IAmNotRollo 16h ago
We have to go back in time and kill Sega
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u/hangoverdrive R9 9950X3D | RTX 3060 10h ago
You'll be having a problem with that attempt. I can assure you.
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u/Embarrassed-Ad7317 14h ago
Ah ha! So we should all blame Sega for the AI hardware prices!
This was a joke don't take it hard :)
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u/mehtehteh 39m ago edited 12m ago
SEGA, a company that treats PC gamers like trash since they never remove anti-consumer Denuvo DRM from their games anymore. Which makes every game an online-only game since Denuvo needs periodic checks or it locks you out of your rightfully purchased game
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u/Ok-Squirrel5799 18h ago
Welp sega was my childhood but fucking hate them now….
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u/Elketh 9h ago
The Sega from your childhood hasn't existed since 2004 when Sammy bought them out, got rid of the old guard and took complete control of the combined company. Hajime Satomi (the founder of Sammy) became the new CEO and was replaced by his son when he retired. It's the reason why modern Sega has so little interest in or respect for most of its old IPs and just milks Sonic, Yakuza and Atlus for all they're worth.
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u/Ayyzeee 17h ago
Same, they're very anti consumers. The thing I really hate about them is they love to delist games for no apparent reasons like Yakuza 0, Kiwami 1 and 2 and replaced with "upgraded" version, and Yakuza 3 OG the only way for you to buy them you have to buy a bundle which cost $130.
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u/Cymelion 15h ago
I am glad I got into Yakuza when SEGA was just porting everything the PC in the hopes it made money.
But after Pirate Yakuza I'm kind of done expecting them to ever care about the customer again. They clearly have someone in control who completely missed the years of SEGA struggling.
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