Cool article, but I must mention a typo/geometry error.
On page 2, the article states, in reverence to the NV3: Riva 128, "It switched from using quadrilaterals as the most basic geometric primitive to the far more common polygon."
I have two issues:
1: Quadrilaterals are polygons.
2: The NV1 use quadratic surfaces, not quadrilaterals, which is stated correctly on the first page. That means, areas that are solutions to quadratic equations: spheres, planes, ellipses, hyperboloids, and paraboloids.
So we're talking about moving from the NV1 generating ACTUAL curves (I think it was actually a approximation, ironically enough) to generating, effectively, triangles. It's almost too bad, because it would've saved us that decade of using hexagons as spheres.
Reference: https://devtalk.nvidia.com/default/topic/401930/alternate-universe-cuda-and-quadratic-surfaces/