yeah this exactly. I was half way through playing QII first time round when I went from Software to a VooDooII. I'll never forget firing a plasma rifle down a tunnel and watching the lighting effects coming off the bolt as it went down tunnel. There hasn't been such a step change in graphical capability as those days of going from a software renderer to a hardware one. (also at the same time, was unreal... I never understood why that one room near the start was "slippery" until I got that VooDooII and suddenly that room had a mirror finish and the slipperyness fell into place. I think real time ray tracing in games is now that next step change but even then, nowhere near as dramatic as software to hardware was back in the day.

I would argue that VR is the next step like this. Even taking an "old" title like Skyrim drives home that no matter how nice the renderer makes it look on a screen, it is still flat. With VR you are in the place. Does the raytracing look really, really nice? Yes, definitely. Is it that much better? I don't think so (personal opinion, of course)...

Working in VR, I think ray tracing is really going to come into its own with VR. Some of the effects that are mostly just nice visuals on a monitor actually make VR more usable. Accurate contact shadows for example are super important to our brain when picking up and putting down objects off surfaces to help get an accurate sense of distance and are extremely hard to do well with rasterization based techniques but they "just work" with ray tracing (given enough performance).

Other things like more accurate reflections and specular effects add more to VR where subtle head movements that don't produce the correct response our brain expects impact immersion even when we're not able to consciously identify why the rendering is not quite right.

The additional performance demands of VR mean it will be a while before we really see these benefits realized but I think when it all comes together it will really improve immersion.

There are some other potential benefits to basing VR rendering around ray tracing too that might take even longer to realize. For example you can directly compensate for the optics of the lenses when generating rays and avoid the whole post process warping step and foveated rendering is very easy to incorporate naturally.

This is a good point I hadn’t thought of that much. Ray tracing is more easily able to get to ‘stereo correctness’ than all the screen space effects and other great tricks that have worked so well for games.

Presumably the sampling rate can also be limited in places the user isn't looking (with eyetracking etc)?

Yeah, that's what I meant by foveated rendering. You can spend your samples where they are most valuable based on where the user is looking among other factors.

now compare it to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0uurJ-zjhok and try saying "big difference" with a straight face again

Not Glide mode? ;)

Now that you mention it, I don't remember if it was opengl or glide, it was over 20 years ago. Same effect tho.

I just remember seeing all of the ambient lights and glows and thinking how amazing it looked. Specifically some early campaign map where you're going through dark sewers that had a bunch of little lights that emit a glow.

But after the coolness factor wore off, it was back to using the most minimal settings possible to maximize visibility and frame rates to play it online.

If it was Voodoo you'd be using Glide. That was their proprietary API.

But yeah, the biggest improvement was putting it into Glide/OpenGL and watching all the new lights appear.

Quake and Quake II didn't actually use Glide but a MiniGL wrapper for translating the OpenGL calls.

YES! Now I remember. Unreal Tournament used glide though. UT was my vice.

There is a 3DFX Mesa/Sage port

http://dk.toastednet.org/Q2DOS/

No Glide though, so it won't run under emulation it needs an actual 3dFX card.