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Comment by benj111 | Hacker News Reader

Not to detract from your point but I seem to recall Doom being playable on PCs of the day. *

I remember some years after quake 2 was out (99ish ?) a friend showing off his new computer by actually playing quake 1 with all the bells and whistles turned on.

So yes the engines did develop quickly. Much quicker than the PCs of the day in fact.

*being school kids, these weren't gaming PCs, these were for 'homework' and 'research'.

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I think the hardware was moving forward equally quickly, but there was a more dramatic spread between the low and high end of the installed base. People waited years between upgrades because computers were so expensive. At the same time, Moore's law really was doubling speeds every 18 months.

When Wolf3D came out in May 1992, its minimum spec targeted the installed base of 286s, and a 50Mhz 486 was bleeding edge. When Doom was released in Dec 1993, you could buy a Pentium. (And if you kept it till '96, that Pentium could manage Quake at 320x200).

I agree there was a bifurcation in the late 90s when 3D hardware acceleration arrived (see the colored lighting and texture filtering in the Q2 screenshot). Quake 1 was getting patched with hardware rendering up until Quake 2's release, likely the bells and whistles your friend showed off :)

PCs would keep up fine, but only so long as you had a 3D graphics accelerator (3dfx or similar). Since it was something that was only of use in games at the time, many builders omitted it, resulting in a large gap.

Still, Q2 was perfectly playable even on below-average PCs at the time of release, if you were willing to stick to the same resolution as Doom (i.e. 320x200).

Because I was curious, recommended specs (quick searching):

Wolf, 1992: 386, 4 MB memory, 8 MB disk

Doom, 1993: 486, 8 MB memory, 40 MB disk, Sound Blaster Pro/compatible

Q1, 1996: 75 MHz+, 32 MB memory, 128 MB disk, SBP/c, GeForce 6200 LE / Radeon Express 1200

Q2, 1997: 90 MHz+, 32 MB memory, 32 MB disk, SBP/c, 4x CD-ROM, GeForce 6200 LE / Rage 128 Ultra 16 MB

Which isn't to knock the awesome folks at id at all! Just, it was a heady time on both the hardware and software sides.

Geforce 6200 LE is a card from 2004, are you looking at modern specs for the versions of the games on Steam? Quake was originally released with only a software renderer and later GLQuake was released with OpenGL support, that only really ran well initially on 3DFX Voodoo cards, although technically I think S3 Verge and some other 3D accelerators were supported. Quake 2 supported 3D accelerators at launch but also had a software renderer, like many notable PC games of the late 90s (Half-Life, Unreal tournament, Deus Ex, etc). Quake 3 was controversial in 1999 for being one of the first major PC games that required a 3D accelerator, among other things, the term GPU didn't really get used for PC graphics cards until Nvidia released the Geforce 256.

I was looking at whatever pulled up.

Most of those are on the other side of the pre-internet chasm though, so not much accurate info.

Thanks for correcting!

Q1 didn't need 32 megs. We had it running on 8. I remember working all summer to but another 8 when I was building a monster rig to goto 16 in 1998

Quake was completely playable on high end gear dx4100 and p60 was fine. Quakegl came about later.

"completely playable" usually doesnt mean 8 to 12 frames per second in 320x200

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