The wild 90s: PCGH is looking for PC games with memorable graphics – intermediate status with Half-Life 1, Unreal 1 and UT

Original article from 05/12/2022: It is an almost impossible task to objectively assess which PC games were particularly influential in the graphics category in which release year. And as so often, it’s all a matter of perspective. Games that were breathtakingly beautiful in the 90s often haven’t aged well from today’s perspective.

Which PC games of the 90s were formative at the time?

And yet we want to pay homage to the very PC games of that era and have started a survey that all PCGH readers can take part in. We want you to name your favorites from the ’90s – with the feeling of yesteryear. In the video we only show a few suggestions as to which well-known PC games are from the 90s. These include Comanche, Sim City 2000, Wing Commander 3, Command & Conquer 1, Pro Pinball The Web, Schleichfahrt, Outlaws, Unreal, Half-Life 1 or Dungeon Keeper 2. But there are many other well-known games that are also known for their Graphics were convincing at the time, for example Monkey Island, Doom, Ultima Underworld, Tomb Raider, Star Wars: TIE Fighter and many more.

Take part in the survey now: Please click here

The 90s were kind of divided for PC gamers. While console gamers with Nintendo 64 or Playstation 1 were already able to enjoy smooth and textured polygon graphics, luxury Pentium processors were already working at the performance limit with simple and pixelated 3D graphics at 320×200 pixels. The release of the NV1 by Nvidia in 1995 or the S3 Virge in 1996 did not alleviate the problem either. On the contrary, these chips often improved the graphics, but the refresh rate dropped significantly – even behind that of a fast Pentium processor. But that changed with 3dfx and their voodoo accelerator in 1996.

Instead of unfiltered textures and low refresh rates or resolutions, the Voodoo chips conjured up high-resolution 640×480 pixels, often at 30 fps, on the screen at the time. A simple, OpenGL-based and very resource-efficient programming interface called Glide motivated many game developers to add 3dfx hardware support to their 3D software engines. So you could give games a new look. From then on, Tomb Raider, Need for Speed ​​2 Special Edition, Formula 1, Eurofighter 2000 and other top titles were regarded as the driving force for 3dfx, since these games only offered optimal and fast 3D optics with 3dfx Voodoo processors. But as attentive PCGH readers know, the Glide programming interface was not granted eternal life. With the increased emergence of API alternatives such as Open GL and DirectX and strong competition in the graphics chip sector, the glide effect gradually disappeared. By 2002 at the latest, with the release of Direct X 9 with Pixel and Vertex Shader 2.0, the success of Microsoft’s API could no longer be stopped.

Take part in the survey now: Please click here

To give you a little more inspiration, we’ve created a gallery of some well-known games from the ’90s. The following overview is not without a certain subjectivity. You should also note that indexed or confiscated games are missing – among them were certainly the odd graphic highlight.

What do you think of the idea of ​​giving classic PC games a new stage in this way? Should we repeat the experiment for the 2000s and 2010s as well? Use the comment function and let us know what you think. You must be logged in to PCGH.de or the Extreme forum to comment. If you don’t have an account yet, you can consider registeringwhich brings many advantages.

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Update from 05/19/2022: More than 600 participants have already taken part in the survey. It is characterized by real classics in head-to-head races: Half-Life 1 (1998), Unreal 1 (1998), Unreal Tournament (1999), Quake 3 (1999) and as the oldest are very well placed Game in the Top 5 Doom (1993). Nothing is lost for the games in the following places such as Tomb Raider, Quake, Wolfenstein 3D, Comance or Quake 2, but of course the appropriate fans are now needed to collect more votes. Thanks in advance for your participation.