NEC Responds to FFVII Problems

Owners of NEC PowerVR cards have been angry since buying Eidos' Final Fantasy VII and discovering that the chip wasn't supported - although the PowerVR logo is displayed on the box.

On Thursday, NEC issued a public statement on its web site describing how the apparent mix-up happened. GameSpot News spoke to NEC's Charles Bellfield, product marketing manager for PowerVR. He gave us some additional insight into the problem - and whether or not there would be a fix.

NEC says the PowerVR logo was placed on the Final Fantasy VII box well in advance because of printing scheduling. The printing of the box takes considerably more time than it does to burn the game onto the CD. This is where the problem began.

It seems FFVII is compatible with NEC's PowerVR Second Generation (PVSG) chipset. But currently, there are no PVSG video cards on the market that use the chipset and none expected to show up on store shelves for several months. The first product to be released using the chipset will be Sega's upcoming console, Dreamcast. No announcements have been made yet regarding when the PVSG would grace PCs.

Since the game is Direct3D optimized, NEC placed the PowerVR logo on the box months ahead of the game's release. It appears that somewhere in the mix, it was determined that the current PowerVR cards would not support Final Fantasy VII. Since the boxes were already printed and NEC wanted its logo on the box for when the still-unavailable PVSG cards were released, it stayed.

Bellfield gave an example of a similar situation, but one that had a very different outcome. When Quake II shipped, the box didn't have the PowerVR logo but the CD did have the drivers built in. It wasn't known if Quake II would have PowerVR support months ahead of time so the logo wasn't added to the box.

Bellfield went on to say that "Eidos did everything possible to get the chips to work with the game," but in the end the current chips wouldn't support FFVII's features.

To make it clear, Final Fantasy VII for the PC does not support the current PowerVR PCX-1 or PCX-2 chipsets. And because these chipsets don't support some of the higher functions that Final Fantasy VII needs to run, NEC will not be building patches to alleviate the problem.