Author here. I wanted to share this piece of personal and technical history from the early days of 3D graphics. The article covers the meeting on my houseboat with Jensen, Curtis, and Chris in 1993, working on biquadratic texture mapping for the NV1, and how Microsoft’s sudden pivot to triangles in DirectX nearly broke the company before their pivot to the RIVA 128.
It also digs into the paperwork anomaly I recently uncovered regarding my Technical Advisory Board options and the vesting schedule. Happy to answer any technical questions about the early 90s VR/graphics scene or the NV1 era!
Quads and biquadratic texture mapping truly were an awful choice and it's incredible that the company still pulled through. I have an NV1 floating around somewhere; I should dust it off again.
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.
Eric_Gullichsen · · focus · HN ↗
SyzygyRhythm · · focus · HN ↗
I'm familiar enough with the history, but I really have to wonder why quads were pursued. It seems like even at the time, triangles were the obvious long-term bet. Of course it's never quite that obvious at the time, but nevertheless quads seem like one of those weird tech offshoots that are simply too different to ever get traction, like ternary arithmetic. And the trajectory of transistor counts was such that per-pixel division for perfect perspective correctness was simply inevitable.