Thirty years ago, SEGA wrote NVIDIA a $5 million check and saved the company from going under. Jensen Huang flew to Tokyo to say thank you in person, and the two companies announced that SEGA’s game lineup is coming to NVIDIA RTX Spark. The first confirmed title is Virtua Fighter Crossroads, the new installment in the fighting franchise that the original NVIDIA NV1 chip powered when it became one of the world’s first 3D fighting games on PC.
The announcement was made at GiGO Akihabara 3, the former site of the legendary SEGA Akihabara Arcade, and featured Huang alongside SEGA CEO Haruki Satomi, COO Shuji Utsumi, Virtua Fighter creator Yu Suzuki, and former SEGA President Shoichiro Irimajiri, the man who approved that original $5 million equity investment in the mid-1990s. When NVIDIA went public in 1999, SEGA sold its shares for $15 million. At NVIDIA’s current market cap of roughly $5 trillion, that stake would now be worth hundreds of billions of dollars, a detail Huang has been diplomatically quiet about for years.
NVIDIA VP Deepu Talla confirmed that the partnership covers “all of SEGA’s games” coming to RTX Spark, though the specific title list beyond Virtua Fighter Crossroads has not been published. Speculation naturally runs toward franchises SEGA controls through Creative Assembly, Yakuza, and Persona, but nothing has been confirmed. Virtua Fighter Crossroads itself is scheduled for 2027, and it is not yet confirmed whether RTX Spark will see a launch-day release.
RTX Spark was announced at Computex 2026 and it is NVIDIA’s GB10 Superchip combining a 20-core Grace CPU with a Blackwell RTX GPU delivering up to 6,144 CUDA cores and up to 128GB of unified memory. The catch is that the Grace side uses an Arm-based CPU, which means Windows game compatibility currently runs through a translation layer. NVIDIA and SEGA have not specified whether their titles will get native Arm64 builds or rely on that translation, which is the actual open question here: a native port is meaningfully better, and a translated build is a much weaker story. The unified memory architecture of the GB10 presents gaming performance challenges that make DLSS integration important for the best RTX Spark experience.
SEGA franchises carry decades of nostalgia and a genuinely global fanbase, and the RTX Spark platform needs exactly the kind of killer-content story that brand-name IP can provide. Whether this ends up being a native-port partnership or a marketing association with translation-layer compatibility underneath is a question worth watching as launch gets closer.
RTX Spark systems are expected “this Fall.” Let us know in the comments which SEGA franchise you are hoping to see on the platform.
Discussion (12 replies)
Join Discussion →I'd like to see some tecmo games on the spark... but that's different... I just like some of their games.... well seeing them at least.
First off - ok, so RTX Spark is a CPU. There kinda needs to be an entire machine, with Ram and storage and stuff...
Second - it's ARM... so not exactly groundbreaking for anything to be ported to an ARM CPU these days.
And lastly - people have to buy these machines, and then the games, for this announcement to mean anything at all. And today is the day of $1k+ Steam Machines and console manufacturers firing their entire workforce because hardware is basically non-existent.
Would be better for Sega to say they are backporting their entire lineup to Apple or Android or something (as much as I would cringe at that, it makes a lot more business sense).
I'd be interested in a new Nvidia+Sega partnered Shield console/handheld powered by RTX Spark.
I'd rather see a Dreamcast 2.
Tile based FTW! Though history said otherwise.
Wait! I was wrong, its still alive and well, huh, funny how.it just got rolled in the industry in silence.
It's an SoC with a 20-core Grace ARM CPU and some kind of Blackwell GPU I believe.
Exactly what I was thinking. I was not even familiar with RTX Spark until now. So are there systems coming with these SoCs in them? The article says "RTX Spark systems are expected 'this Fall.'" Is that so? I hadn't heard sh1t about that, but okay. And what exactly are these, handheld or mini systems? Laptops too?
But yes, I too am confused by this nVidia + Sega announcement. Kinda weird. Seems strange. I dunno.
Also. Seems that even though nVidia is announcing this, when you read about Spark, it sure seems like they are pushing it towards AI use too.
And if it can be used for AI, the voracious appetite of that monster consumes all.
Yep, https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/06/01/nvidia-officially-reveals-its-arm-based-processor-the-rtx-spark-superchip-at-computex/
Nvidia's attempt to kill x86.
Honestly reads more like a stab at Apple.
That said may be all about price in the end I guess.
The chip reads pretty muscular.
Honestly with 128 gig of ram meaning 96 gig for ai/inference and 32ish left for io and os... of you can daosy chain these like the Mac mini with the custom os to get 360+ gig of effective ram to natively run LLMs with obscene amounts of parameters without dropping 200k on a aerver.. that's pretty huge.
While you cant use this to train an AI effectively its still a great way to expiramnet.
[URL unfurl="true"]https://www.thefpsreview.com/2026/07/28/early-testing-of-a-prototype-nvidia-rtx-spark-laptop-with-the-latest-616-00-driver-shows-that-system-optimizations-are-still-a-work-in-progress/[/URL]
Well huh, look at that.