You can find a lot of discussion about what the minimum specs for Quake are. Famously, it needs a decent FPU, and the Pentium was a convenient early CPU with a decent built-in FPU. It was significantly faster than a 486.

…But people have managed to run Quake on the 486.

And the myth people tell about Quake is that it killed Cyrix, because Quake performance on Cyrix was subpar. But was that true? And if it was true, was that because the Cyrix was slower than a Pentium, or was it because the Quake code had assembly that was hand-optimized for the Pentium FPU pipeline?

Anyway. “Most simple computer that could run Quake” is probably going to include a decent FPU. If you are implementing something on an FPGA, you can probably get somewhere around 200 MHz clock anyway. At which point you can run Quake II.

I played Quake on a 486 66Mhz DX2 with 16MB of RAM in the 90s. On the lowest resolution, but it was fine.

That’s only because everything can run Doom now.

As other had said: the only 'deal breaker' here is FPU.

Q1 is playable but not on any modern understanding of that word on a system with Am486DX4/100 with 16MB RAM and S3 Trio64V+. You can disable sound effects for a couple FPS more.

Mostly you would be fine because the level design in Q1 heavily tends to the closed spaces and corridors with only a glimpses of the outside and a rare halls and caverns. That being said the Necropolis would be a test of strategic thinking for turn-based FPS and Ziggurat Vertigo is unplayable.

[dead]