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The fact that triangles have proliferated is not due to half-assery. Hardware can rasterize them very quickly, and a triangle can have only one normal vector. Quads can be non-planar. It's true that quads are nice for humans and artists though!

As an aside, Catmull-Clark subdivision has been around since 1978, which, as a first step, breaks an arbitrary polyhedron into a mesh of quadrilaterals.

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It's not so much that triangles are the primitive, as much as our logic for combining multiple triangles into a mesh and texturing, lighting, and deforming them in continuous ways clearly has some gaps. It's definitely not an easy problem and it's a fun exercise to see how various silicon innovations unlocked increasingly accurate solutions, and what corners needed to be cut to hit 30fps back in the day.

Yeah, I don't think triangles will go away anytime soon. And, sometimes they're even preferred in certain cases by artists (think creases on jeans).

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