5 ms·

Getting some sort of 3d accelerator for openGL and turning it on in the settings I remember being a glorious thing.

• phusion 10y ago
  I was a little late to the game and didn't get a 3d card until Quake 2 was out and had been patched a few times. I bought a Diamond Monster 3d (add on card), plugged it in, installed the drivers and loaded up Quake 2... no difference. After being frustrated, I finally found that I had to enable the OpenGL driver/mode and the console screen dropped, then revealed those rockets flying down the hallways in glorious, well lit 3d! I played for hours before finally going to bed, that was truly amazing. I eventually got GLQuake and did the same for Quake 1, it was so exciting!
  • blt 10y ago
    Wow, I have almost the exact same memory. Think mine was a 3dfx-branded Voodoo 2 (released after the Voodoo 3 came out, but I couldn't afford it). The switch from nearest-neighbor to bilinear texture interpolation was amazing, but it was the yellow cast light from moving rockets that I remember most clearly. Q3A and UT were soon to follow, Rainbow Six, it was a good time for PC gaming.
    • tgb 10y ago
      Anyone know what they were doing for lighting by rockets? Seems like per vertex wouldn't work and pixel shaders were a lot way off. Did early opengl have specific functionality for that?
• animal531 10y ago
  Definitely. Going from a max workable resolution of 320x240 up to 3d accelerated 640x480 (with far better looking textures due to mip-mapping) was amazing. The first games I got working on my 3dfx was Quake and Tomb Raider, both game changing for the time.