It was only 3dfx and NVIDIA (since the TNT) that mattered in the 1990s though. All the other 3D accelerators were only barely better than software rasterization, if at all.
Seeing Quake II run butter smooth on a Riva TNT at 1024x768 for the first time was like witnessing the second coming of Christ ;)
Rendition's VQuake was actually pretty good, more than barely better than software rasterization.
Edge anti-aliased polygons!
Before that, you could even run Quake with anti-aliasing on one of those "barely better than software rasterization" cards, couldn't even be done on the first Voodoo cards.