Which early 3D "look" stands up better to you?

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Pemalite said:

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The PC ended up getting many PS1 ports (I.E. Final Fantasy) but the PS1 ports on PC looked like a pretty big step up over your average N64 titles, especially when operating under 3dfx Glide... And especially at high resolutions. (You could have had 1080P back in 1995 for instance! Although older voodoo cards were resolution limited.)


But yeah, late 90's/early 2000's the PC was doing allot of "experimenting" with games... We had one of the best games of all time, Sacrifice, we had Black and White, Giants: Citizens Kabuto, Battlezone 2, Dark Reign 2, Homeworld... List goes on, was definitely a "golden age". - But far from being "early 3D" as the Geforce GPU was on the minds of PC gamers at that point rather than TNT, Rage, Virge, Verite or Voodoo. etc'.

But the early era of 3D Graphics on PC was happening around 1996 with the advent of "Quake" and when running on a Rendition GPU, it had improved lighting, bilinear filtering, 16-bit colour, dynamic lighting, anti-aliasing was an amazing experience.

Yes, I remember the first wave of 3D chipsets, but they still were harder to set up, and SW support had to be quite explicit and while present on most big games, it was very far from widespread, GeForce was the first to make HW 3D very user and dev friendly, and GeFo 2 MX the first to make it mainstream too. Previous chips like TNT and Rage (I had one and i was angry for years with ATI for not fulfilling its promise of OpenGL drivers for Win 9x too, they made NT ones only, and NT back then offered very scarce compatibility with games) were sometimes hyped as "3D", but without additional cards like the 3DFX, they offered only some final layers of the 3D pipeline, but not the geometric transformations ones. Back then, though, Quake I and II and even more Heretic II and MDK were able to do wonders even with the SW 3D engine, as long as we accepted to stay within 800x600 res, while with Duron and GeFo 2 MX I was able to push them to 1024x768 or even 1152x864, and with better framerate too.