About 3 months later I upgraded to a Pentium 200 and realizing that I'd been playing at 1/3rd speed because the 486 just couldn't handle it. Red Alert become much more fun after that.
Wasn't it Mode X, i.e. 320x240?
vid_describemodes
Lists all available video modes, built-in and VESA.
vid_mode #
Switches the video mode to mode #. Quake has 11 built-in modes:
0: 320x200
1: 320x200
2: 360x200
3: 320x240
4: 360x240
5: 320x350
6: 360x350
7: 320x400
8: 360x400
9: 320x480
10: 360x480
0 is the default mode. Modes above 10 are not built in, but are VESA
modes which may be supported by Quake and your hardware. Use
vid_describemodes to see the available VESA modes.As a result, even though you could set Mode-X explicitly, it wasn't optimized so it went slower than plain 13h and wasn't even page-flipped. So there wasn't a compelling reason to use it, except for the square pixels.
I agree it is wrong to call it "VGA", as the VGA (Video Graphics Adapter) was able to display graphics in a variety of resolutions.
The standard resolution used for games was the 256 color 320x200. VGA allowed a couple of other non-documented and harder to achieve resolutions in 256 color, but this was the standard one, and also Quake's default mode.
640x480 was 16 color.
Standard text-mode VGA was 80x25 characters of 9×16 pixels for a total of 720x400 pixels.
SVGA was even more diffusely defined, as different vendors supported different resolutions.
I've always mixed up "Array" and "Adapter" for VGA, as EGA stood for Enhanced Graphics Adapter, and CGA was Color Graphics Adapter.
I think, they initially wanted to release it for high powered 486s (66 Mhz or higher), where VGA was really the only option.
The perspective correct texture mapping used a divide per 8 pixels, and this required a high-powered 486.
In the end they more or less dropped 486 support, because they did perspective mapping using the FPU, which allowed for parallel processing of pixel output and the perspective divide on the Pentium (averaging just a few clock cycles per pixel), but caused slower processing on the 486DX which had a much slower FPU.
I still preferred VGA over SVGA on my Pentium 133Mhz, because it was significantly more smooth.