This sent me down a huge rabbit hole of memories and reading. Thank you! I remember everyone being hyped for that card for their first Pentium / Pro builds at the time but I think a lot of people held off for the Pentium II and a TNT or Rage 128 card that I was hanging around with.

Agreed, those early manufacturers/models that experimented more feels more relevant than the more incremental listings of multiple 2000 3000 and 4000 series NVidia GPU's.

Very interesting culture difference between rendition and 3dfx in their chip design approach..

its a very honorable mention in my eyes because its more appropriate of the tile of "first independent Graphics unit" than the Geforce 2. (did more than just blast already projected triangles at the screen)

not that it was an awesome product, but certainly it was flexible.

a good (albeit tiny) demo of that is that vquake has the same wobbling water distortion of the software renderer quake but rendered entirely through the gpu. Perhaps with some interpretation this could be called the "caveman discovered fire" of the pixel shading era.