NVIDIA And SEGA Renew 30-Year Partnership To Power Games On RTX Spark

While Windows on Arm may someday grow to become a mainstream platform, it's not there yet, and so the NVIDIA RTX Spark is an idiosyncratic platform. Idiosyncratic hardware usually isn't well-suited for games. Yet, if games are produced specifically for the hardware, it can deliver some of the best performance on the market. That's why it's fascinating that NVIDIA is collaborating with SEGA to bring "all of SEGA's games" to the RTX Spark.


That was the statement made by NVIDIA VP Deepu Talla, and confirmed in a gathering in GiGO Akihabara 3, the former site of SEGA Akihabara Arcade. CEO Jensen Huang piled into the arcade with SEGA veterans Yu Suzuki (creator of Virtua Fighter) and Shoichiro Irimajiri (former president), as well as the current CEO Haruki Satomi and COO Shuji Utsumi, all to announce the new collaboration while surrounded by arcade machines running SEGA's classic arcade hits—particularly Virtua Fighter, as that's the first title announced for the collaboration: SEGA's upcoming Virtua Fighter Crossroads.

So why this collaboration? If you're not familiar with NVIDIA's history, you might not understand. Let me share an anecdote: as a life-long SEGA fan, I was super hyped when I first heard about the Diamond Edge 3D sometime in early 1996. This was a graphics card that let you play Sega Saturn games on your PC! Wow! That turned out to not exactly be accurate, of course, and the story of the Edge 3D and the NVIDIA NV1 is far too long to tell in this post. However, it was true that there were versions of SEGA's Virtua Fighter Remix, Panzer Dragoon, and Daytona USA available, and you played them with Sega Saturn controllers plugged into the card.


That card was powered by the NVIDIA NV1, NVIDIA's first graphics processor, which was developed in cooperation with SEGA and used similar rendering technology to the Sega Saturn game console. Were it not for the NV1 and that deal with SEGA, NVIDIA as we know it today would not exist; the aforementioned Shoichiro Irimajiri was the one who approved a $5 million equity investment in NVIDIA. Jensen Huang, who co-founded the company in 1993, clearly remembers those times, as he's always spoken favorably about SEGA, so this collaboration isn't actually that surprising.

Some of the concern around the RTX Spark as a consumer product has been worry over the chip's gaming performance. Being that the parts use Arm CPUs, they'll require the use of a translation layer to run virtually all Windows PC games, and that's going to harm performance a little. However, with this announcement, at least some latest-generation games seem like they'll be getting native Arm Windows ports, and that might let us see the real power of RTX Spark.


Unfortunately, we don't actually know if this deal means that SEGA is going to release Arm-native versions of its upcoming games, or if it will simply validate them on the RTX Spark platform. We also don't know which games will be included besides Virtua Fighter Crossroads. That title is scheduled for release next year; it's not known if the RTX Spark version will be available on launch day or if it will come later. It's also not clear when systems with the RTX Spark itself will be available; "this Fall" is the best we've got.