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 mode

How does this relate to the NV-1? I thought it used quads instead of triangles. Did it do accelerated NURBs as well?

>>datpif+5f3
reminds me of PowerVR main selling point being tiled rendering, but they tried pushing some proprietary "infinite planes" BS

https://vintage3d.org/pcx1.php

"Thanks to volumes defined by infinite planes, shadows and lights can be cast from any object over any surface."

>>rasz+wz3
If it was marketing they didn't seem to do a great job... Very little online except for mentions of "NURBS", and this thread.

It's not intuitively obvious to me how a rasterizer accelerator would render NURBS surfaces at all (edit: without just approximating the surface with triangles/quads in software, which any competing card could also do)

>>datpif+AB3
I was also wondering about this. I only remember two vaguely related mentions, both are from a bit later time and one of them turned out not to be NURBS but Bézier patches :)

- Curved surfaces in Quake 3: https://www.gamedeveloper.com/programming/implementing-curve...

- Rhino 3D support: https://www.rhino3d.com/features/nurbs/