Super FX
More info
- Creator
- Argonaut Software and Nintendo
- Released
- 1993
- Type
- RISC coprocessor in a game cartridge
A RISC processor that lived inside the game cartridge and drew polygons for a Super Nintendo that was never designed to do 3D.
Argonaut Software, Jez San's British studio, had coaxed vector graphics out of the Game Boy and pitched Nintendo a dedicated chip to go the rest of the way. It debuted in 1993 with Star Fox (Starwing in Europe). Early units have MARIO printed on the die — Mathematical, Argonaut, Rotation & Input/Output — and the Super FX name came later.
The console's picture processor can only show tiles, so the chip rendered polygons into its own framebuffer in cartridge RAM, already laid out as tiles, and the console then copied the result into video memory by DMA. That bought flat-shaded polygons at around fifteen frames a second. The Super FX 2 doubled the clock to 21 MHz and carried Yoshi's Island and the SNES port of Doom. The cost sat in every cartridge rather than the console — an early case of upgrading the hardware by selling it with the game.