Microsoft Windows and success of 3D console

By 1996, the rise of Microsoft Windows and success of 3D console titles such as Super Mario 64 sparked great interest in hardware accelerated 3D graphics on the IBM PC compatible, and soon resulted in attempts to produce affordable solutions with the ATI Rage, Matrox Mystique and S3 ViRGE. Tomb Raider, which was released in 1996, was one of the first 3D third-person shooter games and was praised for its revolutionary graphics. As 3D graphics libraries such as DirectX and OpenGL matured and knocked proprietary interfaces out of the market, these platforms gained greater acceptance in the market, particularly with their demonstrated benefits in games such as Unreal. However, major changes to the Microsoft Windows operating system, by then the market leader, made many older MS-DOS-based games unplayable on Windows NT, and later, Windows XP (without using an emulator, such as DOSbox