I think both SGI and Quake were absolutely crucial.
Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space.
Quake (and Quake 2, and Quake 3, and the many games that licensed those engines) really opened the floodgates in terms of mass market users demanding OpenGL capabilities (or at least a subset of them) from their hardware and drivers.
I'm not sure how to measure this in an objective way, but if the mass market of PC gamers didn't dwarf the professional CAD/modeling market by several orders of magnitude, I will print out my HN posting history and eat it.
And yet the modern GPU features are pretty much the result of a close symbiosis between hardware vendors and the Direct3D team. For a while, GPUs were categorized by the D3D version they supported (today the focus has moved more towards raw compute performance I guess).
You're having a different discussion than everybody else.
Everybody else is this discussion is talking about the PC 3D API space. The place where OpenGL lives. It's right there in the title of the linked article.
"Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space."
In this thread we're talking about the impact of Quake's OpenGL support in the early days of the Quake franchise (1996-1999).
OpenGL was most definitely PC-only[1] during those days[2]. So to anybody who understands the subject matter... it's extremely obvious we're talking about PC graphics APIs.
I am sorry you don't know the subject matter or the history, but that is a poor excuse for attempting to "correct" people who do. Very rude.
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[1] "PC" as in "personal computer", not "Windows PC". OpenGL has been supported on Windows, macOS, Linux, BSD, Solaris, etc.
[2] OpenGL basically is still PC-only, although since Linux supports it, it can run in a lot of places. PS3 and mobile devices had OpenGL ES, a different and more stripped down API)
Without Quake, OpenGL would have remained an extremely niche thing for professional CAD and modeling software. And Microsoft would have completely owned the 3D gaming API space.
Quake (and Quake 2, and Quake 3, and the many games that licensed those engines) really opened the floodgates in terms of mass market users demanding OpenGL capabilities (or at least a subset of them) from their hardware and drivers.
I'm not sure how to measure this in an objective way, but if the mass market of PC gamers didn't dwarf the professional CAD/modeling market by several orders of magnitude, I will print out my HN posting history and eat it.