Product Information

The NV1 chip from NVIDIA Corp. is the PC industry's first single chip accelerator supporting all of the multimedia features supported under Microsoft's Windows 95 including :

• 2D/GUI acceleration (DirectDraw)
  
• Real time, texture mapped 3D acceleration (Direct3D)
  
• Wavetable audio acceleration (DirectSound)
  
• Full motion video acceleration (DirectVideo)
  
• Digital input acceleration (DirectInput)
  

In short, NV1 delivers complete acceleration of every key DirectX API supported under Windows 95.

Single Chip Acceleration

By using individual hardware engines connected by a 600MB/second data bus, the NV1 achieves concurrent acceleration and delivers higher performance than any multimedia accelerator on the market. Using this single silicon footprint, five hardware engines provide functionality that typically require three separate PC cards from other vendors. With this single chip architecture OEMs can create more cost efficient boards and developers can build content with synchronized audio, video, graphics and input.

Combining the engines on one chip eliminates the cost and physical constraints of multiple cards, allowing NVIDIA to optimize resources at a system level rather than focusing on coordinating resources across several chip sets. One result of that optimization is efficient memory allocation: a total of 1MB of framebuffer memory is all that is required to run the engines and deliver a high performance board that makes content run faster. The remaining resources such as texture memory and audio wave samples use the one chip bus mastering DMA engine to transfer files from system memory

The combination of five high performance engines in a single chip architecture results in a chip optimized for minimal memory use, and a lower cost bill of materials. Add to that the confidence of a product based on standards like DirectX from Microsoft, and the value proposition for the NV1 is higher than any other multimedia accelerator on the market.