I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX e

I was just a teenager and enthusiastic LAN party participant back then, but also was learning the basics of 3d modeling, animation, and gamedev. The pre 3DFX era was kinda interesting. The first hardware accellerated game I saw was VQuake on the Rendition Verite 1000 or whatever the branding was. It blew me away. When the Voodoo1 came out I was shocked by the framerate, but thought it looked ugly compared to the Rendition version. Technically the Verite had worse texture filtering, but I was used to the aliasing and thought the Voodoo looked overly smoothed. Back when 2d acceleration mattered Matrox was king. And you could always trust it'd drive even the most picky CRT at whatever refresh rate. You also could get the capture card with the Matrox Millenium and turn a Win95 pc into a legit video editing station, all be it hilariously limited vs today. I worked with a non profit briefly that did stop motion animation production with this setup. I was the first with a TNT2 at the big LAN party group in my area. The Voodoo2 SLI setups were still faster, but with the TNT2 you could do 16 bit color with a tweaked color map for id engine games, and it looked absolutely killer.