zlacker

Funny thing, when I heard about those "3d graphics accelerator" cards in the late 90s, I just thought they were meant to make your 3d games run faster. But Quake II and similar games already ran very fast in my machine.

It wasn't until I went to some cybercafe where they had Quake II, among others, installed for network play in computers with one of those 3dfx cards, that I actually saw what an accelerator card could turn a game into, regardless of speed, and I decided that I needed one of those.

>>severi+(OP)
That sounds like a really cool experience. Could you expand further on the differences you saw?

>>AlecSc+l
Something similar to the first screenshot in the article. Until then, Quake II on software graphics was a cool game for me but a game where you saw pixels everywhere, like every other game at the time. Discrete graphics cards on the other side made the game's graphics take a huge leap forward. It was a quality (and not just speed) I hadn't seen before, so much so that it was almost a different game for me. I guess it was 1999 or so.

>>AlecSc+l
Going from low rez, point-sampled to high rez, bilinear filtered (+antialiasing if you are lucky) is a huge quality leap. Basically PlayStation 1 vs PS2.