Engineering:NV2

Cancelled before completion, NV2 was to be NVIDIA's second PC 3D accelerator graphics chip.

Overview

A successor to the NV1, NV2 built upon its predecessor's unusual quadratic 3D-rendering architecture. It was initially considered for use in Sega's Dreamcast console, due to the relationship cultivated between NVidia and Sega over the porting of Sega arcade and Saturn console titles over to the PC platform, where the similarity in NV1's and Saturn's 3D-rendering architecture aided in the porting process. (The NV1 graphics cards 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.) 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.

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 its Dreamcast console.

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.