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.
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?
I suppose you could direct rasterize a projected 3D curved surface, but the math for doing so is hideously complicated, and it is not at all obvious it’d be faster.
I'm not really convinced curves are that useful as a modelling scheme for non-CAD/design stuff (i.e. games and VFX/CG): while you can essentially evaluate the limit surface, it's not really worth it once you start needing things like displacement that actually moves points around, and short of doing things like SDF modulations (which is probably possible, but not really artist-friendly in terms of driving things with texture maps), keeping things as micropolygons is what we do in the VFX industry and it seems that's what game engines are looking at as well (Nanite).