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The G3 iMac that came out in this time period had much weaker 3D rendering capability than a contemporary PC gaming video card like a TNT2. Their video ability was closer to the 2D/office oriented video cards sold for non gaming use...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RIVA_TNT2

Or a voodoo2...

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Yes, but Half-Life was designed to be somewhat playable with software rendering even on a 133MHz Pentium and that would have been the better rendering path on the earliest iMacs. In my opinion in that generation Half-Life's software renderer looked better than most of those cards due to the blurry textures and poor scaling (lack of VRAM basically unless you had cash for the 32MB versions) so no big loss for single player play.

To bring up an almost three decade old debate, it would be fascinating to see the performance difference between PPC and x86 in software rendering. Probably mostly bandwidth limited at this point still.

PPC ended up being a brilliant design done mediocre, while x86 is a mediocre design done very well.

I don't know the details but I would imagine that the comparison would shift quite a lot over those years due to the rollout of SIMD features on both sides along with the other microarchitectural improvements. I'm not sure I would characterize PPC as being mediocre, I think the designers hit more or less the target they wanted even if the top line performance numbers weren't hands down higher than the contemporary x86 parts and it didn't have the shine of IA64. There's a reason we still fly PPC 750 variants in some critical systems. If you think back to that period Apple was moving from 68k (where they were both one of the biggest customers for the chips but also not enough volume to field a part competitive on desktop) to PPC where they were no bigger (maybe declining unit volume) but at least part of a stronger coalition of users. The group's interest diverged (no laptop roadmap) and I'm guessing Apple wanted to switch to x86 as early as 2002 and it just took a few years to get the company stabilized enough to make the jump.

Edit: It would be interesting to look at the software rasterizer and game engine problems in a modern context of big compute and superoptimizers and see what is possible. I'm guessing not much above what the hand-tuned code of the era got, but maybe significant in the context of doing these kinds of retro-ports on a small budget.

The 1998 release required a 500MHz processor at a minimum... 133MHz might be pushing it.

There were no 500MHz x86 processors in 1998. Pentium III wasn’t launched until the early 1999 and it wasn’t until well into the 2000s before games started requiring such beasts.

Myself, I played Half-Life on a 233MHz Pentium MMX, software rendered. It ran… adequately.

500MHz was not a thing in 1998, an expensive desktop PC was a slot based Pentium 2 350MHz in 1998. The 500MHz P3 came at least a year later and was quite high end for its time.

In early 1998 a more normal baseline home gaming desktop PC was like a Pentium 266 MMX.

https://archive.org/details/halflife1998ownersmanual/page/n3...

Minimum: 133 Recommended: 166+

Pentium 133MHz was coincidentally the fastest machine I had at the time but also the minimum spec labeled on the box. (my laptop had a Chips & Technologies 65550, so no 3D help there)