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GPU for its Dreamcast console, but eventually canceled the order and used NEC's PowerVR GPU instead, citing Nvidia's outdated technology.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.