GL Quake Unfiltered Textures

When I played GL Quake the first time using my then brand new Voodoo card it was a revelation. The smooth textures, lack of defined pixels and speedy framerate was out of this world. Normally Quake struggles a lot to run at 640×480 on a 150-200 MHz Pentium machine which is cured basically by the Voodoo card. That said the completely smoothed out textures aren’t to everyones liking which I can understand. It does wash things out a bit and I recently came upon this article: https://www.quaddicted.com/webarchive/www.quaddicted.com/software-vs-glquake/software-vs-glquake-texture-filtering/

It goes into detail on how you can actually turn off the filtering GL Quake employs and the best way I can describe it that it now looks more pixelated and reminds me a lot of the modern interpretations of retro shooters that are coming out these days. I think I like it! Pictures go in order of unfiltered and normal mode for each set.

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Now while I think I prefer this look these days it’s easy to forget that this sort of smooth texture filtering was something completely new. We were totally used to seeing pixelated effects back then so what the Voodoo cards did was a total eye opener. Still I like options!