3dfx: So powerful it’s kind of ridiculous

>>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
NURBs are more high-level compared to triangles. Single triangle primitive cannot be ill-defined and is much easier to rasterize. There are other high level contenders - for example SDFs and voxels. Instead of branching out the HW to offer acceleration for each of these, they can all be reduced to triangles and made to fit in modern graphics pipeline.

It's like having a basic VM, high-level languages are compiled to the intermediate representation where things are simpler and various optimizations can be applied.

zlacker