That's it, damn those lens flares looked impressive back then in all their 32 bit glory.
I had also forgotten the game's name and had been wondering for months which game I was faintly remembering. Your comment reminded me of it and thankfully allowed me to narrow the age of the game down, enabling me to find it. Thank you for that!
I was playing it (or its demo, that is) on a P3 667 MHz with TNT 2 Pro. I was a total hardware noob at the time so I don't really remember how well it ran. The first game I had played on the system was Drakan, where I could check all the options and became interested in what those actually affected and meant. Before that system I was on a P2 300 MHz IIRC but I cannot remember the GPU, if it even had a dedicated 3D one. I remember playing Starcraft on that. I think that P2 was the machine I added a Voodoo 2 to at some point. I also put that Voodoo 2 into the P3 machine later on because I wanted to play FF7 with Glide.
This was the first PC I started tinkering with beyond the previous Voodoo 2. Some mild software overclocking, later I upgraded the RAM and installed a Geforce 2 MX 400. At the time it was hard for me to pick a suitable upgrade and was torn bitween the MX400 and a Kyro 2. I was playing Hard Hard 2 - King of the Road at the time and there were reports of massive issues with that game on a Kyro 2. So the Kyro 2 had in interesting approach to rendering, was pretty powerful but, to me, failed because of usability/driver issues. Sounds familiar.
I purchased the Geforce 2 MX 400 on 9/11, being unaware of what was happening until I returned home in the late evening (what a time that was before mobile phones...) in a timezone ~6 hours ahead of NY. Big oof.
The PC after that one was selected and built entirely on my own, thanks to having access to internet guidance. Athlon 2700+ Thoroughbred (an easy pick at the time) with a Radeon 9500 Pro (here I was torn between that and a Geforce 4 Ti 4200. I cannot remember what made me pull the trigger on the Radeon). It was a great system for all my needs and I never had issues that I could trace back to it being an ATI card.
I think I built another PC in 2005/2006 when I was in university, but I cannot find any emails to trace back the components. I vaguely think it would feature a X1000 series radeon. Or I wanted to do that, but never followed through. I need to investigate further.
In early 2009 I built a system with Core2Duo E8500 and Radeon HD4870. Never any issues there either, besides the PSU exploding spectacularly (it got replaced within 24 or 48 hours, bequiet support works).
That was following by a Xeon 1231 v3 with GTX 970 (now 1070 as my wife's PC) and then a Ryzen 7 3700X with 2060 Super (now 2070 as my PC) after the 2060 Super did not work in the previous rig, presumably due to PSU issues.
I am growing old. I also never grew to value contemporary state of the art graphics in games and even today I play old stuff a lot and reduce image fidelity on current titles because it "looks wrong". And because I want the GPU to STFU and remain silent.
