NVIDIA has landed in Akihabara, Tokyo, Japan, for a rare yet impactful occasion – They are meeting with SEGA to announce what they have been working on for the 30-year anniversary of that fateful encounter.
Yes, it is all about gaming, with SEGA’s VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS coming to RTX Spark-powered devices to help users get a bit of relaxation in after powering through all sorts of AI-augmented productivity tasks.
For a little bit of history, while most people are familiar with the US$5M investment story from SEGA into NVIDIA, which saved Team Green from complete bankruptcy during the development of the SEGA Dreamcast. But when the original Virtua Fighter’s PC port was released, it was largely the NV1 that provided the smoothest 3D gaming support under the hood.
Additionally, Jensen Huang also talked about how he was impressed by SEGA’s ability and skills in early 3D games with titles like Daytona USA, Virtua Racing, and the aforementioned Virtua Fighter, which led to the ambition of crafting a custom graphics chip for at the time, SEGA’s next-gen console.
Beyond VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS, other SEGA games are mentioned to join the list of RTX Spark-optimized titles, although the actual list wasn’t ready at the moment. But they confirmed that these titles will take advantage of the chip to enable things like DLSS, ray tracing, and more.
In other news, NVIDIA also announced several collaborations and projects with various Japanese companies in advancing AI and robotics in terms of development and deployment that matches the same push ushered by the Japanese governmen.
