balls.gif
Click the polyhedron. Discover the lore.

balls.gif - A little piece of 1996

28 FRAMES · 108 × 108 · 134 KB

A file called balls.gif sat in the banner of NVIDIA's 1996 “NVelope Your Senses” games page: a tiny animated dodecahedron, spinning through 28 frames.

Hidden inside its GIF comment was a maker's signature:
GifBuilder 0.2 by Yves Piguet

GifBuilder was Macintosh freeware. That signature points to a wonderfully humble origin: an early NVIDIA website animation made on a Mac with a hobbyist tool.

The quiet joke? A file named balls.gif, on a site whose hero graphic was a wireframe hemisphere resolving into a smooth sphere, was actually a polyhedron. Flat faces - the very thing NV1's curved-surface architecture was designed to move beyond.

One little animation. A whole universe of lore.

Wayback Machine

For more information:

Bruce Brough (Brough Communications)
Tel: (408) 430-0100
Fax: (408) 438-0204
email: bruce@brough.com

J.P. Rossomme, PR Contact
SGS-THOMSON
Tel : (617)259-2534
Fax : (617)259-9423

NVIDIA Corporation and SGS-THOMSON Announce the NV1 and STG2000 Multimedia Accelerators

Breakthrough Single-Chip Accelerators Deliver Unprecedented Multimedia Power to the Consumer Personal Computer Market

Sunnyvale, CA-- May 22, 1995-- NVIDIA Corporation and SGS-THOMSON, today announced the introduction of the NV1 and STG2000 Multimedia Accelerators. The first complete multimedia accelerators, the NV1 and STG2000 represent the culmination of a strategic partnership that began over a year ago.

The NV1 and STG2000 are the first complete Multimedia Accelerators to deliver the power of real-time photorealistic 3D graphics, video based special effects, full-motion video acceleration, and concurrent high-fidelity audio, in a single chip. Providing immediate benefit to consumers, they enhance the quality and speed up the performance of today's PC multimedia applications. In addition, leading interactive entertainment developers are capitalizing on the powerful technologies of NV1 and STG2000 to create a new generation of applications that promise to completely transform the PC multimedia experience.

NVIDIA's President and co-founder, Jen-Hsun Huang said: "It is NVIDIA's objective to make our technology widely available to the PC consumer. We are presented with the opportunities of a very large market but the semiconductor industry is badly capacity-constrained. By combining SGS-THOMSON's global excellence in consumer and computer microelectronics with NVIDIA's architectural and design innovation, we are able to provide our customers with reliable, high volume delivery of leading edge technology."

Tim Chambers, Director of the Graphics Business Unit for SGS-THOMSON said : "The winning combination of SGS-THOMSON's submicron manufacturing technology and technical leadership with NVIDIA's architecture achieves a breakthrough in PC interactive multimedia. When combined with our successful product development in digital video compression, communications, audio and mixed signal technologies, SGS-THOMSON is now uniquely able to provide a growing range of affordable multimedia solutions - in volume."

Market coverage will be provided by two versions of the multimedia accelerator. NVIDIA will market and sell the NV1 (VRAM version) while SGS-THOMSON will market and sell the STG2000 (DRAM version). Both products are available with PCI and VL bus interfaces. The NV1 or STG2000 allow leading-edge adapter card and PC OEMs to offer a multimedia sub-system with dazzling 3D, wave-table audio, GUI acceleration, enhanced game port performance, and video acceleration -- on a single-card with a street price of around $200.

NVIDIA is a privately held company developing VLSI and software acceleration technology to transform the personal computer into the ultimate multimedia platform.

SGS-THOMSON is a global independent semiconductor supplier listed on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE:STM) and on the Bourse de Paris. It designs, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and discrete devices used in a wide variety of microelectronics applications, including telecommunications systems, computer systems, consumer products, automotive products and industrial automations and control systems.

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