Some of the responses in this thread are so predictable.
OS4 was lambasted for it's inability to support halfway decent 3D despite running on higher end Radeon cards.
3D support arrives, and suddenly it's another reason to complain.
I've had nothing to do with Nova but I do know Warp3D and from the description of how this works, it's simply nothing like the original Warp3D. And believe me, that's a good thing. The original Warp3D suited old cards where the only thing they accelerated was rasterisation. By moving vertex data to buffer objects, the supported cards are now able to accelerate every part of setup and rendering.
All that is missing now is an OpenGL implementation on top. MiniGL suffered because it could only use Warp3D to handle the very last stage of the graphics pipeline and often had to do very nasty workarounds to get basic GL tasks done.
Shader support on older cards might be poor, but they still support VBO, hardware transformation, clipping and lighting. That means that significantly better drivers are possible for Nova running on the older Radeon hardware.