Hi Burr,

> Is there such a thing as a NURBS Video Card?

No, not for Trimmed NURBS surfaces which are complex to process.

There is some new stuff in the latest generation of Direct3D 11 cards to tessellate spline surfaces on the card, but it can only handle simple untrimmed surfaces, they don't have anything for processing trim curves.


> A video card that renders NURBS on the screen? No translation to poly's.

Well, one method for rendering NURBS "directly" can still actually involve polygons, it just dynamically produces enough polygons until each one is smaller than a pixel on the screen so you can't tell that they are polygons.

Another method is to do raytracing where you shoot out rays from the eye point and do an actual line/surface intersection for each pixel on the screen.

Either one of those involves a heavy amount of computations, so it tends to not be fast enough to do for a real-time viewport display.


- Michael