Nvidia and Sega are teaming up again, 30 years after Sega saved Nvidia from bankruptcy

[DragonSlayer101]

Forward-looking: Thirty years after Sega partnered with Nvidia to bring its arcade fighting game Virtua Fighter to PCs running on the Nvidia NV1 multimedia card, the two companies have once again teamed up to launch the franchise's next title, Virtua Fighter Crossroads, on laptops and desktops powered by the Arm-based Nvidia RTX Spark. The collaboration will also extend to other upcoming Sega titles, the companies confirmed.

According to Nvidia's press release, the new Sega games will support its latest upscaling and rendering technologies, including ray tracing and DLSS. The company added that its latest AI tools will also be supported by the upcoming titles, hinting at integration with its AI-powered neural rendering technologies, such as Reflex and G-Assist.

– VIRTUA FIGHTER CROSSROADS (@VFCROSSROADS) July 15, 2026

Neither Nvidia nor Sega revealed the names of the other games coming to RTX Spark, but online speculation suggests that several upcoming Sega titles, including Creative Assembly's Alien: Isolation 2 and Total War: Warhammer 40,000, as well as the next installments in the Yakuza and Persona franchises, could receive support.

The announcements were made earlier today by Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang at an event in Tokyo celebrating the 30-year partnership between Sega and Nvidia. The gathering featured a reunion between Huang and former Sega president Shoichiro Irimajiri and was attended by Sega's current CEO Haruki Satomi, COO Shuji Utsumi, and game designer Yu Suzuki.

Speaking at the event, Huang reminisced about how Irimajiri helped save Nvidia from bankruptcy in the 1990s by providing a $5 million cash infusion just as the company was running out of funding. Huang later admitted that Sega's timely investment was the only thing that kept Nvidia afloat and that Irimajiri's "understanding and generosity" saved the company from insolvency.

Sega had previously tapped Nvidia to develop a custom GPU for its Dreamcast console, but eventually canceled the order and used NEC's PowerVR GPU instead, citing Nvidia's outdated technology. Irimajiri still paid Nvidia the $5 million contract fee, but structured the payment as an equity investment, allowing Nvidia to develop the commercially successful Riva 128 and GeForce 256 gaming GPUs.

When Nvidia went public in 1999, Sega sold its shares for $15 million, tripling its original $5 million investment. While that may have seemed like a reasonable decision at the time, Nvidia's market capitalization now sits at around $5 trillion, meaning Sega's stake would have been worth hundreds of billions of dollars had the company held onto its shares.

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Nvidia and Sega are teaming up again, 30 years after Sega saved Nvidia from bankruptcy

 

[Kirby1]

Having a game run on hardware made for gaming isn't exactly a news-worthy collaboration techspot.

 

[NumberNine]

I guess the only way to move the state of computing forward and disrupt the entire paradigm was for Nvidia to develop a platform that is exactly like Apple's but also completely incompatible with it. Clearly we're witnessing a level of vision and leadership that my peasant brain is just too primitive to parse.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

I guess the only way to move the state of computing forward and disrupt the entire paradigm was for Nvidia to develop a platform that is exactly like Apple's but also completely incompatible with it. Clearly we're witnessing a level of vision and leadership that my peasant brain is just too primitive to parse.

This is some insane.....I dont even know what to call it. Delusion?

How, exactly, does a game supporting an ARM platform that runs Linux ANYTHING like apple's walled garden?

 

[The Talking Tech]

If Nvidia truly wanted to thank SEGA for saving them from going bankrupt, Nvidia should offer SEGA a subsidized partnership in creating the DreamCast 2 fully power by Nvidia technology.

Buy I guess that's too much to ask for a Multi Billion dollar company to do for the very company they gotta thank for their existence today.

 

[seeprime]

If Nvidia truly wanted to thank SEGA for saving them from going bankrupt, Nvidia should offer SEGA a subsidized partnership in creating the DreamCast 2 fully power by Nvidia technology.

Buy I guess that's too much to ask for a Multi Billion dollar company to do for the very company they gotta thank for their existence today.

You misspelled Trillion.

 

[OortCloud]

If Nvidia truly wanted to thank SEGA for saving them from going bankrupt, Nvidia should offer SEGA a subsidized partnership in creating the DreamCast 2 fully power by Nvidia technology.

Amazing idea!
Given the open goal left behind by Sony and MS it would probably do well too!

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Amazing idea!
Given the open goal left behind by Sony and MS it would probably do well too!

I would love to see it. People already soil themselves over nvidia GPUs in PCs and how Evil nGREEdia is and how EVIL jensen is, can you imagine fi they made a console and it started clobbering Sony? Oh my god the AMD fans would blow a gasket.

 

[NumberNine]

This is some insane.....I dont even know what to call it. Delusion?

How, exactly, does a game supporting an ARM platform that runs Linux ANYTHING like apple's walled garden?

Both ditched CPU dependencies for in house chips on single board designs with unified memory architectures soldered directly to the board and ARM compute. If you want to see them get even more similar just wait until you see the pricing.

 

[SRB]

I would love to see it. People already soil themselves over nvidia GPUs in PCs and how Evil nGREEdia is and how EVIL jensen is, can you imagine fi they made a console and it started clobbering Sony? Oh my god the AMD fans would blow a gasket.

I doubt it...Not that they're wouldn't be a market, but there is no where near enough RTX 5090 buyers to create an ecosystem around. Sony's nervous about a $1000 console, a $3000 plus console/laptop is a non starter for the mass market.

 

[Neatfeatguy]

G-Assist.....

I suppose at one point in time gamers were considered nerds, especially those that were strictly PC gamers. So I suppose some Gspot-Assist is needed for some of us.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Both ditched CPU dependencies for in house chips on single board designs with unified memory architectures soldered directly to the board and ARM compute. If you want to see them get even more similar just wait until you see the pricing.

So making a PC with your own CPU and soldered RAM means you have a walled garden?

Did you cry about AMD doing that with Strix Halo, or Intel with any of their mobile platforms, or are we only doing "nvidia bad" here? I dont seem to remember you melting down over AMD turning into Apple.

I doubt it...Not that they're wouldn't be a market, but there is no where near enough RTX 5090 buyers to create an ecosystem around. Sony's nervous about a $1000 console, a $3000 plus console/laptop is a non starter for the mass market.

If we were seriously considering hardware design, the 5060ti is ~50% faster then the PS5 GPU, and trades blows with the PS5 pro. The existing Spark design is faster then both those, on paper at least.

The Spark is very expensive, but you dont need 20 cores or 128GB of memory for a game console. Downgrade to 8 cores, 32GB of RAM, underclock the GPU since its bandwidth restricted anyway to increase yields, and give it slower PCI gen 3/4 storage, downgrade the PCIe controller, remove the unnecessary I/O, and suddenly matching the $1k PS5 prod doesnt sound all that undoable. The Spark is 382mm2, but over 207mm of that is just CPU, so cutting it in half would bring us down to ~280mm2, about the size of a RTX 5070 GPU.

But the low margins of the console space played a big part in nvidia's disinterest int he space. They supplied Sony with GPUs and fleeced them hard in the process, since sony was rather desperate at the time, and they screwed MS on the OG xbox.

 

[Squid Surprise]

If Nvidia truly wanted to thank SEGA for saving them from going bankrupt, Nvidia should offer SEGA a subsidized partnership in creating the DreamCast 2 fully power by Nvidia technology.

Buy I guess that's too much to ask for a Multi Billion dollar company to do for the very company they gotta thank for their existence today.

Let's not forget that one of the main reasons they were facing bankruptcy in the first place was that Sega cancelled their order for Nvidia's GPUs to be put in the Dreamcast...

While it was "nice" of Sony to invest $5 million, it probably had more to do with hoping for future dealings with Nvidia / leverage when dealing with other GPU companies when making a Dreamcast successor (which, alas, never happened).

Businesses rarely act completely altruistically, and this was no exception.