I sold my 6 months old Amiga 4000 when I realized the PC VGA cards coming out around then were cheap, had 1024x768 resolution, blazing DOS pixel writes and nothing of value had happened with the Amiga chipset from 1985 to 1992..
Remember TSENG LABS? :)
I also think I saw Ultima Underworld or some of the variants on PC before this, rendering full free-view 3D in a sub-window at least. Was really blown away by that, this was before Doom came out.
You don't remember AGA? It could do those resolutions and all versions of the Amiga chipsets had blazing pixel writes. The article even mentions this. You obviously didn't read the article and weren't in the Amiga community.
AGA was much too little, too late. The premier AGA model, the A1200, even shipped without even a sliver of FASTRAM, making all programs compete for cycles with the graphics chipset. An Amiga games with even, say, 64 kbytes of FASTRAM could have put compute code in there at twice the speed and even made use of the (rudimentary) instruction cache of the 68020. The A1200 was welcome and I loved it but it was a half-assed attempt and it showed.
It's not surprising, but very sad. For very little cost they could have doubled the CPU speed of the 1200. For the A500 it made more sense to not have fast RAM, because the CPU itself was kind of slow. But the 68020 was noticeably slowed down by slow RAM wait states. Either the A1200 should have shipped with some (even miniscule) fast RAM, or AGA should have had higher bandwidth so the CPU wouldn't have had to wait for the RAM. A vanilla A1200 was an unbalanced machine.
...rant over. :-D
Yeah, the A4000 is the "other" model. It's really neat, but alas it never sold in any numbers. It showed in that some AGA software I tried (demos? some game?) didn't work right on my A4000.
I hand coded asm demos and music trackers for Amiga since 1986, and there is no need to be rude on HN.. keep that to reddit :)
This was ages ago, but as far as I can recall, the main obvious limitation of the AGA chipset compared to the PC cards was 1 byte-per-pixel modes (I think they call it "chunky" modes now) so the simple texture-mapping 3D loops you could hand-code on the x86 were a pain on the Amiga. I'm sure now 30 years later people have figured out cool hacks to do this better but back then it didn't work, and adding to this was the fact that the PC cards were improved like every 6 months. Commodore went bankrupt 1 year after I bailed, and I didn't look back.. (though I did miss AmigaDOS real multitasking for some PC/Mac generations after :).
The A1000 I had was a great machine in 1987-1990 but somewhere after that the whole Amiga concept started to feel dated (IMO). The PC architecture won because it was essentially hardware open-source, and hundreds of vendors could add features to the platform together. Commodore would have had to do every single decision spot on correct for years in order to stay competitive as a single company. Look at what happened when IBM tried to tame the beast and released the PS/2 that was "closed source"..
The Amiga CD32 featured hw-accelerated chunky-planar conversion. And yes, the PC was an open system but this also meant that every MS-DOS game had to implement its own hardware-specific routines targeting multiple types of graphics and sound hardware. The Amiga approach came with the benefit of having a single, uniform target which encouraged more optimized coding.
I didn't know that! However the CD32 was at that point in history (1993) a blip, it was far too little far too late. It sold 125,000 units, while the PC clone market was shipping 37 million units in 1993.
I agree fully with the OS issues, but for the purposes of gaming, it turned out to not be an issue really I guess..
Remember TSENG LABS? :)
I also think I saw Ultima Underworld or some of the variants on PC before this, rendering full free-view 3D in a sub-window at least. Was really blown away by that, this was before Doom came out.