The Voodoo cards had no right to look as good as they did for their time. Someone rebuilding one from scratch is exactly the kind of project HN was made for.
It was just way harder to program for. Triangles are much simpler to understand than bezier curves after all. And after Microsoft declared that DirectX only supports triangles the NV-1 was immediately dead.
Not really. Forward texture mapping simplifies texture access by making framebuffer access non-linear, reverse texture mapping has the opposite tradeoff. But that is assuming rectangular textures without UV mapping, like the Sega Saturn did; the moment you use UV mapping texture access will be non-linear no matter what. Besides that, forward texture mapping has serious difficulties the moment texture and screen sampling ratios don't match, which is pretty much always.
There is a reason why only the Saturn and the NV-1 used forward texture mapping, and the technology was abandoned afterwards.
Nor did their marketing:
Nvidia was very smart to advertise 16 bit performance _and_ 32bit quality at the same time :)
3dfx were stupid not to include token 32bit output option on Avenger chip (voodoo3). Every voodoo chip since first one has performed blending calculations in full precision and only dropped to dithered 16bit output to save on framebuffer ram, but that ram saving was meaningless by the time 16MB V3 released.
They're both beautiful in their own way, the darkness and glow in the hardware versions, some certain pixellated charm and roughness in the software version