zlacker

>>BirAda+(OP)
My first video accelerator was the Nvidia NV-1 because a friend of mine was on the design team and he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model since you could do a sphere with just 6 of them, whereas triangles needed like 50 and it still looked like crap. But Nvidia was so tight fisted with development details and all their "secret sauce" none of my programs ever worked on it.

Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.

In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.

Sigh.

>>ChuckM+25
> he assured me that NURBs were going to be the dominant rendering model

Wow, this sounds like those little cases where a few different decisions could have easily led us down into an alternate parallel world :)

Can someone expand on why NURBs didn't/don't win out against polygons?

Could this be like AI/ML/VR/Functional Programming, where the idea had been around for decades but could only be practically implemented now after we had sufficient hardware and advances in other fields?

>>Razeng+K5
Because it's exactly like the parent said: Nvidia has always Nvidia & always has been, a tightfisted tightwad that makes everything they do ultra-proprietary. Nvidia never creates standards or participates.

Sometimes, like with CUDA, they just have an early enough lead that they entrench.

Vile player. They're worse than IBM. Soulless & domineering to the max, to every extent possible. What a sad story.

>>rektid+07
I think any company who feels they are in the lead with something competitive would do the same. The ones who open their standards were behind to begin with and that's their way of combating the proprietary competition.

>>jemmyw+I8
Belief in your own technology, even if it is good, as it turns out, is often insufficient to really win. At some point, in computing, you need some ecosystem buy in, and you almost certainly will not be able to go it alone.

Nvidia seems utterly disinterested in learning these lessons, decades in now: they just gets more and more competitive, less and less participatory. It wild. On the one hand they do a great job maintaining products like the Nvidia Shield TV. On the other hand, if you try anything other than Linux4Tegra (l4t) on most of their products (the Android devices wont work at all for anything but Android btw) it probably wont work at all or will be miserable.

Nvidia has one of the weirdest moats, of being open source like & providing ok-ish open source mini-worlds, but you have to stay within 100m of the keep or it all falls apart. And yea, a lot of people simply dont notice. Nvidia has attracted a large camp-followers group, semi-tech folk, that they enable, but who dont really grasp the weird limited context they are reserved on.