zlacker

> 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+(OP)
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+rk
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+vm
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/