Contemporary software was slow. You could tell you should consider more RAM when the HDD light and chugging noises told you it was swapping. But if you ran the same software with the benefit of 10 years of hardware improvement, it was not slow at all.

This might match your recollection. x86 Win95 raytracing in javascript on my arm laptop is usable, but sort of slow:

https://copy.sh/v86/?profile=windows95

Once it boots, run povray, then click run.

It took over 2 minutes to render biscuit.pov, though it did manage to use SSE!