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Apparently the Revolution will utilize a new form of a polygon currently referred to as a NURB or nonuniform rational B-splines. These NURB's are said to be able to generate very detailed graphics within an enormous scope.

In addition, NURB's are known to be much more efficient than standard polygons. It is much easier on a machine to generate an image in terms of NURB's rather than traditional polygons. This fact regarding the new type of image formatting fits very well into Nintendo's design for the Revolution.
Given the inherent design of NURB curves, the Revolution could be substantially smaller and less powerful than the competition but would still be comparable.

Please remember that this information has not been confirmed by any official source. However, for a detailed history of NURB's check out this page.http://www.mactech.com/articles/deve...schneider.html

http://gc.advancedmn.com/article.php?artid=5602

Heh, I have an issue of OPM that's about 6 years old which mentions that the "upcoming" PS2 might be using NURBs as well.

This technology is nothing new, and has already been used to a limited extent in games.

Of course, while it does use very few "control points" (taking less storage space than polygons) it uses a shitload of memory to generate, which is why it is strictly used for curves and nothing else.

One of the maps in Quake 3 used said technology to draw a perfect arch.

NURBs have been around for at least 50 years - minimum. It's nothing new, it just hasn't been widely applied to real-time rendering (for a number of reasons).

Nurbs have been around for years. The first mass CG programs utilizing it were Alias Wavefront (now Maya) and Rhino 1.0. Now almost all, if not all CG packages support it. Available to consumers since about 1997, this is hardly revolutionary.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurbs

Nintendo did say it's not new tech, just used in new ways or something.

I don't get it or don't care.