Or the S3 Savage3D, which, while being inferior to the TNT2, pioneered texture compression.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/S3_Texture_Compression

The article blew a huge opportunity to showcase the great diversity of “Pioneering Era” 3D accelerators (they weren’t called GPUs until later). But instead they just pretended it was always NVIDIA vs ATI, and threw in a few Voodoos.

Loads of games from the era roundtripped their textures through lossy S3/DXT compression and then stored them as uncompressed RGB or RGBA.

I know this because I wrote a Unreal Engine texture repacking tool with a "DXT detection" feature so that I wouldn't be responsible for losing DXT compression on a texture which had already paid the price, only to find that this situation was already hyperabundant in the ecosystem.

Many Unreal Engine games of the day could have their size robotically halved just by re-enabling DXT compression in any case where this would cause zero pixel difference. This was at a time before Steam, when game downloads routinely took a day, so I was very excited about this discovery. Unfortunately, the first few developers I emailed all reacted with hostility to an unsolicited tip from what I'm sure they saw as a hacker, so I lost interest in pushing and it went nowhere. Ah well.

+1 to that, when i first saw unreal tournament with the add-on compressed texture pack was a real WOW moment.