alt Hacker NewsDe-makes are interesting because they continuously seem to show what may have been possible long ago in ancient engines if teams pushed them even further.
Then again maybe that level of detail even in idtech1 would have required more computing than was available for many years.
I do suspect this would not run well on a 75 Mhz Pentium 1. It would be very surprising if Quake 1 was actually the pinnacle of what as possible on the hardware of the time, though. id made exactly one game targeting that generation of hardware, and then their next game had meaningfully higher system requirements despite coming out only a year later. The hardware capabilities were changing so fast that there simply wasn't time to iterate on a specific target.