[qwerty456127]

I've played the first retail release version of WarCraft3 and it was indeed flawless, I haven't noticed a single glitch. But I have never tried the multiplayer mode.

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.

[egfx]

Props to the compatibility lab at Blizzard. They worked a lot of overtime with me. I owned a Matrox Millenium card myself for 3DSmax and TruSpace. There was no such thing as truly dedicated gaming cards. Only high end cards for CAD. The gaming card evolution only came after the first GeForce.

[dualboot]

I disagree.. There were quite a few gaming-focused graphics cards released during the development of Warcraft 3. - 1996 : 3DFX Voodoo(1) - 1997 : Nvidia Riva 128, ATI Rage Pro, 3DFX Voodoo Rush - 1998 : Nvidia Riva TNT, 3DFX Voodoo2, Banshee, S3 Savage 3D,Matrox G100/200/300, Intel i740, ATI Rage 128, Rage 128 Pro, Rage Fury Maxx - 1999 : Nvidia Riva TNT2/Pro/Ultra, S3 Savage 4/Pro/2000, Power VR, 3DFX Voodoo 3, Nvidia Geforce 256, Matrox G400 - 2000 : 3DFX Voodoo4, Voodoo4, Matrox G450, Nvidia GeForce2/MX/GTS/Ultra, ATI Radeon, etc

[egfx]

Believe me I know, I also loved my monster voodoo card but Nvidia changed the game with GeForce 1 and the record breaking scores in 3Dmark. Nothing really was able to deliver spectacular graphics a̶p̶p̶r̶e̶c̶i̶a̶b̶l̶e̶ ̶g̶a̶m̶i̶n̶g̶ ̶p̶e̶r̶f̶o̶r̶m̶a̶n̶c̶e̶ particularly the frustratingly popular rage and embedded intel cards.

[qwerty456127]

That's such a pity people mean spectacular 3D graphics under "appreciable gaming performance". IMHO that's very far from the most important part of a game.

[dualboot]

This is a highly subjective opinion.

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.

[qwerty456127]

I owned a Riva 128 and I can hardly name it a gaming-focused graphics card. I could play no game in hardware 3D mode with it. The only real 3D cards during the days were 3DFX Voodoo 1-2. And this was many years before WarCraft 3.

[swinglock]

Well, there was 3dfx Voodoo before that.

[Aardwolf]

Not sure when development started, but when the game was released the geforce was out for 3 years and the geforce 4 series was already launched.

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.

[egfx]

It was very important for us to deliver the “WarCraft” experience no matter what computer or language you played. It’s true that it was not the most groundbreaking 3D game in term of what was technically possible i guess.

[GordonS]

Was going to say something similar - but thinking about it, games from that time just didn't have many glitches. I don't know if games are just so much more complex now, or there was extra love and attention back then?

[rasz]

>games from that time just didn't have many glitches

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

[GordonS]

What can I say, my experience was different, or it could just be nostalgia :shrug:

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.

[rasz]

pre 3d compatibility nightmares: https://gona.mactar.hu/DOS_TESTS/

[qwerty456127]

Gaming graphics indeed is by orders of magnitude more complex today. Insane numbers of polygons, huge textures, lots of effects impossible to render on a CPU. Back in the days I played everything with software (CPU, also very weak as compared to those of today) rendering (as I've never had a Voodoo) and was ok. I wish today games had graphics this simple.