This is a sortable list of first-person shooter engines.
Early 1970s - Late 1980s: wireframes to flat-shaded 3D
Early 1990s: 2.5D environments, sprites, and textures
Mid 1990s: True 3D Environments, texture mapping/polygons, sprites-to-polygons animation transition, beginnings of 3D Graphics hardware acceleration (3dfx glide-NVIDIA)
Late 1990s: 32-bit color, per-vertex-animation-to-skeletal animation transition, fixed-function pipeline, peak-software-renderer-era
Early 2000s: End of Software Renderer, First GPU (GeForce 256)-GPUs become standard, Increasing detail, outdoor environments, skeletal animation-standard, baked lightmaps/dynamic lighting, Fixed-Function-To-Early Programmable Shaders Transition, Single-Threaded CPU, Real-Time Physics
Mid 2000s: Dynamic Per-Pixel Lighting, High-Dynamic Range (HDR) lighting, Global Illumination, Multi-Threaded CPU, Advanced Physics, fully programmable shader implementation/pipeline
Late 2000s to 2010s: high-resolution textures, widescreen resolution, unified shader model
2020s: 8K, real-time ray-tracing
See also List of free first-person shooters List of game engines First-person shooter engine
References