> well, "modern" before shaders
Interestingly, the N64 actually had some sort of precursor in form of the RSP "microcode". Unfortunately there was initially no documentation, so most developers just used the code provided by Nintendo, which wasn't very optimized and didn't include advanced features. Only in the last years did homebrew people really push the limits here with "F3DEX3".
> and a god awful bilinear filtering on all output.
I think that's a frequent misconception. The texture filtering was fine, it arguably looks significantly worse when you disable it in an emulator or a recompilation project. The only problem was the small texture cache. The filtering had nothing to do with it. Hardware accelerated PC games at the time also supported texture filtering, but I don't think anyone considered disabling it, as it was an obvious improvement.
But aside from its small texture cache, the N64 also had a different problem related to its main memory bus. This was apparently a major bottleneck for most games, and it wasn't easy to debug at the time, so many games were not properly optimized to avoid the issue, and wasted a large part of the frame time with waiting for the memory bus. There is a way to debug it on a modern microcode though. This video goes into more detail toward the end: https://youtube.com/watch?v=SHXf8DoitGc