Voodoo 1-3 couldn’t render 32-bit color, so maybe you were noticing the lower bit depth?

3dfx did design some tricks into the video pipeline on Voodoo 2 and 3 cards that allowed for what they called 22-but color, and it definitely looked better than other 3D accelerator cards’ 16-bit modes - but it was still not as clean looking as true 32-bit color. (Interestingly, the filtering they did was applied after the framebuffer, so screen captures would only ever show the lower quality original.)

I desperately wanted a voodoo card (I was late to the pc party). I'd been playing lots of Goldeneye on the n64 and the gaming press had me convinced that real FPS shooters were on the pc not consoles. What a load of shite, I bought a voodoo 3 for my dad's pc, got quake 2 and was bitterly disappointed. Gameplay wise it was so limited compared to Goldeneye. The world was no were near as interactive. Recently I've seen gabe Newell talking about half life and the crowd bar hitting walls was their way of showing the player real world feedback. He's right, but that's nothing compared to the bullet holes in Goldeneye. To be fair, quake 3, unreal tournament 99 and Deus ex alone justified the voodoo card purchase, but it still felt like a let down.