Priem and his team planned to build a chip that could display graphics at a resolution of 640 × 480 pixels, with high-quality textures and fast rendering speeds. But they would have to invent their way around the PC’s limitations. The biggest hurdle involved the cost of memory. If they used standard chip-design methods on the NV1, the chip would need four megabytes of onboard memory, at cost of $200. This alone was enough to make any graphics card that used the chip unaffordable to most gamers, who were used to much cheaper prices. Before this first era of powerful 3-D PC chips, most
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