I vividly remember my first experience with Quake. I had to turn the settings all the way down as far as they would go, and the game barely ran. We have a 486 DX33. It took me hours to download the 8mb shareware version, and the game stuttered badly. I remember the sound effects would echo badly as the computer could not render the game at full speed. I could hardly make any of the platforming sections, since the frame rate was so low, and there was a palpable delay between hitting the buttons, and getting a reaction. A year or two later, we got an upgraded PC which ran at ~100 MHz, and of course this handled Quake just fine. It was only then that I played it online. I remember distinctly: 800 ping was "pretty good," while over 1000 ping" was on the boundary of playable. We had dial-up only, and were very rural, so our connection quality was not simply slow, but also spotty and high-latency.
I remember that Quake was not designed to run on a 486 at all. The vertex transformation code that did a perspective divide was optimized around the Pentium microarchitecture and wasn't as efficient on other microarchitectures, sometimes much less efficient. Quake is cited as one of the reasons why Cyrix disappeared.
