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Originally Posted by pandy71
Amiga problem was that blitter was same as in 1984 - IBM after 8514 relatively quickly introduced XGA, later XGA-2 - every time hardware was faster than CPU's and preceding gen of graphic HW.
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And 6 years later (in 1996) PC games were still being coded for standard VGA, introduced 9 years earlier. That's a similar time span to the Amiga (1985 + 9 = 1994).
Extended Graphics Array
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The XGA was introduced at $1095 with 515K VRAM and additional $350 for the 512 KB memory expansion (equivalent to $2600 and $820, respectively, in 2023). As with the 8514/A, XGA required a Micro Channel architecture bus at a time when ISA systems were standard...
The VESA Group introduced a common standardized way to access features like hardware cursors, Bit Block transfers (Bit Blt), off screen sprites, hardware panning, drawing and other functions with VBE/accelerator functions (VBE/AF) in August 1996. This, along with standardised device drivers for operating systems such as Microsoft Windows, eliminated the need for a hardware standard for graphics.
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I was knee deep in PCs at that time and I don't recall ever seeing an XGA card. 90% of PCs had a crappy ISA bus 'Super VGA' card such as Trident or Oak - whatever was cheapest. Game developers certainly couldn't rely on customers having anything better. The situation was just like the Amiga, only worse because you needed a much faster CPU to get acceptable results.