BinaryDemon wrote:The first 3d Accelerator that Quake supported was Rendition Verite via VQuake. It doesnt even require Windows like GLQuake. It's not like most of the other big games didnt get patched with some support for other cards, it's just 3dfx did it best.
In fact, Rendition Verite had a good head-start on games support. I remembered reading USENET posts back then that someone regretted buying an expensive Voodoo with no games but just demos to show, while Rendition Verite already had quite a number of titles out there on the shelf, and vQuake was a significant one.
Rendition thought they had struck a gold mine by sealing an exclusive deal with Id on accelerated Quake, but their lawyers worded the contract only forbidding Id to work on other propriety 3D APIs. When 3Dfx showed Id the power of Voodoo, Id couldn't do anything, but ha 🤣 OpenGL wasn't bounded by the contract, so they came up with GLQuake and 3Dfx quickly followed up with the plan for miniGL. So there ended the story and Rendition's supposedly "gold mine" turned into pitfall when vQuake playability paled in comparison with GLQuake running on 3Dfx Voodoo. And, only 3Dfx Voodoo has the power to run GLQuake on consumer PCs.