No, you're right. The attack on the Death Star sequence, in Star Wars (1977), is one of the very first use of 3D computer graphics in film.<p>The tie-fighters and Death Star were drawn as wire-frame. And it was all wire-frame until about '81 - '82. Textured rendering was driven by rapid performance gains with parallel and vector processors. I can't think of any use of textured surfaces until the early 1980s, outside of some experimental things like "A Computer Animated Hand" (1972).<p>The Genesis effect in Star Trek II (1982) was considered mind-blowing at the time. Most people in the audience would have never seen anything like it: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tq_sSxDE32c</a> They used a Cray X-MP supercomputer. A very expensive one minute of film.<p>What we would recognize as the early 3D graphics scifi style emerges in the early-mid 80s. For example, The Last Starfighter (1984): <a href="https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/bkDzkjQodzs?t=32</a>