Quote:
Originally Posted by Promilus
Oh? Except copper and sprites PCs in 92 had blitter in their graphic cards (but ... since there was no standard solution it wasn't widely used in games, but it was used - through dedicated drivers - in Windows and some software). And also those cards already supported modes like 800x600x8bpp or 640x480x16bpp. Way beyond AGA capabilities. So... no. Not really.
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Liar liar, pants on fire.
In 1992, your average "high end" PC was a 386SX20 with 1MB of RAM and SVGA that could do 640x480 8bpp and 1024x768 16-colour, not 16bpp. And that beast would set you back $1799 from Radio Shack USD.
SVGA then was over ISA which was cripplingly slow and the 386SX20 which had to do basically all the work was MUCH slower than a 14MHz 68020. SVGA was little more than a dumb frame buffer. Even the "blitter" on a few high-end cards (which alone cost more than a whole Amiga) offered little more than simple character blitting or line-drawing for CAD work and outside of a few CAD tools had no support.
By 1994 when Commodore was going bankrupt, the best Radio Shack had to offer was a 486SX33 with 4MB and VLB based SVGA pushing 1024x768 in an earth-shattering 8bpp (and 16bpp in 320x240) ... all for the low-low price of $2,199.
But don't take my word for it.
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The 486SX was about as fast as an 020 clock-for-clock and by then a lot of us already had 030's and/or Fast RAM in our 1200's. My first, and almost immediate upgrade, was an FPU and 4MB SIMM. I don't remember who made that, but it was nice. The next was a GVP "Jaws" 68EC030 at 40MHz (which a year or so back I maxed it out to 32MB and swapped the CPU for a regular 68030).