Cool thing was it played nicely on my Pentium-II with a Matrox G550 video card which is famous for being great at 2D an very bad at 3D graphics.
I played a considerable amount of 3D games on the cards listed prior to the Geforce256's release.
Hardware Transform and Lighting was nice but it wasn't as if the industry didn't exist prior to it's release.
Modern 3D with modern graphics cards already existed in 1998 with games like Unreal and Half-Life, imho, on the Riva TNT (not the Voodoo with its 16-bit color ;)).
Of course indeed there still was a larger variety of types of graphics cards and drivers then so indeed more work.
What do you mean? It was pretty standard for a game to work on select few(3dfx, nvidia and maybe ATI if you were lucky) graphic chips and glitch/crash on the rest. You often waited 6-12 months for fixed drivers. Original Unreal just crashed on stock Nvidia TNT2 drivers https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eFqqsYoT4hk
Pre-3D graphics cards I really don't remember having issues like modern games seem to.
Once 3D graphics cards first became a things, maybe I just got lucky with my choices (Voodoo, then Voodoo 2,IIRC).
I'm not saying I had no issues, and downloading large patches over dialup wasn't exactly fun, but I recall bugs being far less frequent.