it is somewhat annoying to us when people refer to star fox as the pinnacle of mode 7, because it's not mode 7 at all, mode 7 can't do anything close to that
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star fox was literally a tech demo for the superfx coprocessor, basically a gpu on the game cartridge
the snes was not capable of 3d rendering on its own, all mode 7 could do was rotate and scale a single flat background layer--it couldn't even do 3d rotations on it, those map screens with the perspective view were using a trick to change the scaling on every scanline
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@terrana Mega Man X had its graphics coprocessor, the Cx4, though we don't know if that was before or after star fox
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@Felthry Close enough that they would have been developed in parallel, so I think they can share credit.
@Felthry Which would actually make it one of the very first consumer GPUs. 3dfx would not be founded until the year following Star Fox's release.