Then I bought a 3DFx Voodoo card and started using Glide and it was night and day. I had something up the first day and every day thereafter it seemed to get more and more capable. That was a lot of fun.
In my opinion, Direct X was what killed it most. OpenGL was well supported on the Voodoo cards and Microsoft was determined to kill anyone using OpenGL (which they didn't control) to program games if they could. After about 5 years (Direct X 7 or 8) it had reached feature parity but long before that the "co marketing" dollars Microsoft used to enforce their monopoly had done most of the work.
Sigh.
Maybe being 1999 it was just a little bit too late to still fully appreciate 3dfx and modern day D3D and OpenGL took over around that time, so I just missed the proper Voodoo era by a hair.
Note that by OpenGL here I meant OpenGL using the Riva TNT (I assume the Voodoo card drivers must have been called Glide or 3DFx in the settings). I've always seen D3D and OpenGL existing side by side, performing very similarly in most games I played, and supporting the same cards, with GeForce cards etc that came later. I mainly game using Wine/Proton on Linux now by the way.
Not for the games framerates indeed, but I did set my CRT monitor at 120 Hz to avoid eyestrain. You could effortlessly switch between many framerates from 60 Hz to 160 Hz or so on those monitors and it was just a simple setting.
Today it seems there now exist LCD monitors that can do (much) more than 60 Hz, but somehow it has to have all those vendor lock in sounding brandnames that makes it all sound a bit unreliable [in the sense of overcomplicated and vendor dependent] compared to back then, when it was just a number you could configure that was just a logical part of how the stuff worked.
The part you're probably thinking of is GSync vs Freesync which is a feature for making a tear-free dynamic refresh rate, something that was simply impossible in the CRT days but does add some perceptual smoothness and responsiveness in games. Not using a compatible monitor just means you're doing sync with the traditional fixed rate system.
What has gotten way more complex is the software side of things because we're in a many-core, many-thread world and a game can't expect to achieve exact timing of their updates to hit a target refresh, so things are getting buffers on top of buffers and in-game configuration reflects that with various internal refresh rate settings.
fun fact: the very same technique used by Freesync, delaying the vsync, works with CRTs
Genericness of Variable Refresh Rate (VRR works on any video source including DVI and VGA, even on MultiSync CRT tubes) https://forums.blurbusters.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=8889