balls.gif
Click the polyhedron. Discover the lore.

balls.gif - A little piece of 1996

28 FRAMES · 108 × 108 · 134 KB

A file called balls.gif sat in the banner of NVIDIA's 1996 “NVelope Your Senses” games page: a tiny animated dodecahedron, spinning through 28 frames.

Hidden inside its GIF comment was a maker's signature:
GifBuilder 0.2 by Yves Piguet

GifBuilder was Macintosh freeware. That signature points to a wonderfully humble origin: an early NVIDIA website animation made on a Mac with a hobbyist tool.

The quiet joke? A file named balls.gif, on a site whose hero graphic was a wireframe hemisphere resolving into a smooth sphere, was actually a polyhedron. Flat faces - the very thing NV1's curved-surface architecture was designed to move beyond.

One little animation. A whole universe of lore.

Wayback Machine
Nviews

Welcome to NVIDIA's FTP (file transfer protocol) page.

This page allows access to software files NVIDIA has chosen to make public in order to enhance or improve functionality of NVIDIA-based products. We offer this service at no cost to users of our products.

The software referenced below has been tested on NVIDIA's NV1 reference design (2MB and 4MB VRAM frame buffers) and SGS-Thomson's STG2000 reference designs (1MB and 2MB DRAM frame buffers), and on selected customer cards.

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