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In late 1996, id Software released VQuake, a port of the Quake engine to support hardware accelerated rendering on graphics cards using Rendition Vérité chipset.

Aside from the expected benefit of improved performance, VQuake offered numerous visual improvements over the original software-rendered Quake.

It boasted full 16-bit color, bilinear filtering ( reducing pixelation ), improved dynamic lighting, optional anti-aliasing and even improved source code clarity, as the improved performance finally allowed the use of gotos to be abandoned in favor of proper loop constructs.

As the name implied, VQuake was a proprietary port specifically for the Vérité ; consumer 3D acceleration was in its infancy at the time, and there was no standard 3D API for the consumer market.

After completing VQuake, John Carmack vowed never to write a proprietary port again, citing his frustration with Rendition's Speedy3D API.