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This paper presents a new unified and optimized method for evaluating and displaying trimmed NURBS surfaces using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU). Trimmed NURBS surfaces, the de facto standard in commercial mechanical CAD modeling packages, are currently being tessellated into triangles before being sent to the graphics card for display since there is no native hardware support for NURBS. Other GPU-based NURBS evaluation and display methods either approximated the NURBS patches with lower degree patches or relied on specific hard-coded programs for evaluating NURBS surfaces of different degrees. Our method uses a unified GPU fragment program to evaluate the surface point coordinates of any arbitrary degree NURBS patch directly, from the control points and knot vectors stored as textures in graphics memory. This evaluated surface is trimmed during display using a dynamically …