VQuake

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VQuake is a source port of Quake that was specifically designed for use with the Rendition Vérité V1000 accelerator. The oldest known source port, VQuake was originally released as Beta 10 on December 2, 1996. VQuake was the first version of Quake to have hardware acceleration, coming out more than a month earlier than the earliest version of GLQuake. John Carmack felt that Vérité provided the best performance per dollar at the time, resulting in the effort by him, Michael Abrash, and chipset maker Rendition to make this the premium Quake experience. Carmack later regretted this choice, finding programming on the Vérité to be frustrating, which after an equally-vexing attempt to port to Direct3D resulted in his support for the non-proprietary OpenGL API.

Made earlier and for the time less-expensive graphics cards, VQuake required trade-offs to achieve a playable framerate on the original Vérité, and as a result was not as feature-complete as the later 3dfx-focused GLQuake and actually did quite a bit of the rendering on the CPU rather than the Vérité GPU. As Vquake was developed against the proprietary APIs that could only be found on Rendition cards in the late 90s this version could not be as widely distributed as the later GLQuake port. While VQuake enjoyed some early popularity around Christmas of 1996 due to being the first hardware-accelerated version on the market, the release of GLQuake eliminated the need for proprietary hardware. Furthermore, due to the lack of emulators (even modern DOS emulators such as DOSBox lack support for Vérité) or other forms of backwards compatibility for the Vérité, modern computers cannot play this source port.

Changes to Vanilla Quake

 * Bilinear filtering, which means the game appears a lot less pixelated.
 * Anti-aliasing, lines of various entities in the world are straightened instead of jagged.
 * 16-bit coloration (not textures) instead of 8-bit.
 * Hardware acceleration, allowing for better frames per second and larger resolutions.