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IshKebabtoday at 11:53 AM1 replyview on HN

Well, it was also known to be fake trickery. But fake trickery that ran fast and looked good.

IIRC Quake 3 levels had true curved surfaces, though presumably they were polygonised at some point in the rendering pipeline.


Replies

Sharlintoday at 3:26 PM

They were dynamically tessellated on the CPU. These days we can of course do the same thing on the GPU, using tessellation/geometry/mesh shaders or even compute shaders, depending.