Early on there was a lot of experimentation in how to render 3D graphics for display on a 2D screen, but by the mid-1990s we've settled on easily hardware-optimized technique that got standardized by OpenGL. Now however we've been switching to "path-tracing", not that path-tracing didn't exist back then.

So how does this more traditional 3D rendering technique work?

To start its remarkable how much we can get out of a single 3D geometric transformation!

1/3?