Thread:Deathstalker666/@comment-1496755-20151224121621/@comment-1496755-20160223133545

Oh, I'm not paying a subscription either - I play on private servers. I cheated the system :P

You've captured it pretty well - Quake was indeed one of the main reasons 1996 was a major boundary in gaming history. There were 3D graphics before, but they always had major limitations. For example, Descent was unable to render outdoor areas, only fully enclosed rooms, separated by doors with a specific size (it uses the so-called "Portal engine"). Many flight sims had 3D polygons, but they had no textures on them - just solid colors. Quake was the first to do 3D the right way. And then it kept gettign better - we got Winquake and GLQuake. Quake 2 added colored lighting and other improved effects. At this point other good engines appeared as well, including GoldSrc or LithTech. This solidified the dominance of Windows and the DirectX technologies.

(1996 was also the year the first Tomb Raider came out!)

In some ways, id tech 4 looks a little better to me than id Tech 5 - probably because the latter tends to use a lot of post-processing effects, which look impressive but may also make things too blurry or too grainy, whereas the older engine has a "cleaner" look without those effects. Or maybe I just have an oldschool bias and prefer the older and simpler thing :P

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