, a pertinent question arises. Just how proto-industrial was the PC back when the OG Fallout game launched in 1997? After all, we're talking glass-tube CRT screens, ribbon IDE cables and less processing power than your bank card, right, something barely better than the monochromatic, diegetic Pip-Boy wrist computer from the game itself?
You'd definitely have wanted an Intel Pentium II which had the legs on the AMD K6 of the time. You'd probably have been looking at a mighty 300MHz model.in the obligatory Quake II timedemo, cranking out a buttery smooth 66fps at 640 by 480 to the K6's laggardly 25fps. You also had to decide if you wanted a card that could do both 2D and 3D rendering, or split those duties across different boards. As it happens, it was the Creative Labs 3D Blaster and its 3D-only 3Dfx Voodoo 2 chip that gave peak results for 3D rendering in Anandtech's late '97 testing, though the Voodoo 2 didn't go on sale until February 1998.
Instead, Fallout was developed using oblique projection to give a somewhat 3D feel to what was ultimately a 2D engine. The rest, as we're obliged to recount, is history., that's pretty hard to dredge up from the annals of history. And frame rates arguably don't apply to a 2D projection title like Fallout in the same way they do a full 3D game.