Was anyone else disappointed with the A1200?

[Amigajay]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sorry but thats simply not true.

The Amiga for all its excellence, was seen by most as a games machine, thats a fact.

The Playstation was the first MUST HAVE console that literally decimated everything before it. To claim that the "consoles" had no effect on the state of the Amiga market is simply asinine.

Developers and publishers were clamouring to work on the Playstation, and for good reason.

It was capable of doing games other consoles (except Saturn) couldn't do and that you would need a proper PC to compete with.

The Playstation was a game changer, and people left the Amiga in their droves to buy it.

Had the AAA chipset been released, as far as i'm aware, Dave Haynie claimed it was at least as powerful as a Playstation, which meant the Amiga would likely have gotten conversions of Playstation titles and it certainly would have prolonged the life of the brand, but the only way Amiga would still be able to compete would be to either go the PC direction with x86 or, to be constantly on the cusp of releasing new technology every 4-5 years so Amiga could have stayed relevant.

But to pretend Playstation had no impact on Amiga A1200 is madness, it affected every machine of the day.

I know it was mostly seen as a games machine, but at the end of the day it was used for so much more, yes i bought a PSX to play the latest 3D games, but it could only play games and only certain types of games, it didn’t fulfil my other Amiga usage i wanted, again these markets are different.

I never said consoles never had any effect, but even after the Megadrive came out and imminent launch of the SNES the Amiga had its best ever year in 1991, all sectors were growing, i think its insane to think a Hombre Amiga didn’t stand a chance to even succeed, i’m not saying it would have sold tens of millions, but even a million sales, prob mostly upgrades from the Amiga community would have been a success imo, i don’t buy the old argument ‘oh the PSX blew everything out of the water, consoles, computers, fridges blah”, we all know the Mac and PC’s carried on to see another day because they were computers and had multiple usages.

The A1200 died with Commodore long before the PSX came out, i never said the PSX effected the A1200 how could it!? Yes it could have affected a Hombre Amiga, but as i put above, different machines for different markets, people do own more than one machine at a time! And people didn’t leave the Amiga in their droves for the PSX, most had already left, it was 3 years after the A1200 came out with zero hope of new hardware.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The trick is in the word 'equivalent'. To be truly 'equivalent' in every way, it would have to be a PC. That was more true back then than it is today, because interoperability between different platforms was a lot worse. People didn't buy PCs to get a hard drive or VGA graphics, they bought them to run PC software. To be truly equivalent, the Amiga would also have to run PC software - IOW it would have to be a PC.

But if by 'equivalent' you mean able to get the same functionality and enjoyment of it, then the Amiga wasn't that far off. It just depends on what you can accept as equivalent.

Good point. However, I mean the latter.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I didn't need an SVGA monitor for my A1200 because it worked on my TV

At a far lower resolution that was nowhere near as good as what a PC of the time could offer.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I didn't need a big hard drive because the OS is in ROM and most games run direct off floppy disk.

Kickstart != OS. AmigaOS 3.x is pretty unusable without a HD.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I also didn't need an expensive graphics card, 'bleeding edge' CPU or huge amounts of RAM because Amiga OS is more efficient and the AGA chipset takes much of the load off the CPU.

Again, AGA can't compare to SVGA in terms of functionality, usability, or productivity.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Again, AGA can't compare to SVGA in terms of functionality, usability, or productivity.

How come? Too slow? That's what acceleration is for.

[redblade]

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

Sure, 64pixel wide sprites were a good deal better, 16 colour per playfield on dual playfield was better, there were benefits on the A1200 but I never felt that many developers got the best out of the machine, most were content to have an extra scrolling backdrop, and thats where the benefits seemed to end.

Its not as if software companies didn't want to support it, Ocean, Gremlin, Electronic Arts, Psygnosis, Team 17, all pretty much went balls deep with the A1200 right away which I suppose is something, but it was clear that the games the A1200 really needed was ones that could close the gap on the PC and stop the exodus of people moving away to other machines.

I thought the Amiga 1200 was a great machine for the price, if only the software catalouge was better. 256 colour syndicate would have been nice, but wheter a STD A1200 would be able to scroll in 8 ways with 8 bitplanes is another question.

Originally Posted by Galahad/FLT

The Atari Jaguar got Doom and that ran in 2MB, i've also seen the ASM source code to Alien Vs Predator for the Jaguar, that also ran in 2MB

Where did you see this source code?? It's not a bad engine as it is only straight flat walls like gloom but has different floors and ceilings on the same level.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The entire CDTV was a mistake, and I say that as someone who was a developer for it.

Bruce: What apps did you develop for it. Do you have the stats for the Amiga 1200s you sold at your shop?

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Foebane

How come? Too slow? That's what acceleration is for.

- Resolution
- Speed
- Colour depth (HAM doesn't count)

Basically what I'm saying is, that even the shittest PC video cards blew AGA out of the water.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Being equivalent would mean, at the very least, having RTG, an accelerator, and a hard drive, which would push the price of the A1200 far beyond the price of the "equivalent" PC. You can't call a stock A1200 equivalent to a 386DX with SVGA and HDD.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

The trick is in the word 'equivalent'. To be truly 'equivalent' in every way, it would have to be a PC. That was more true back then than it is today, because interoperability between different platforms was a lot worse. People didn't buy PCs to get a hard drive or VGA graphics, they bought them to run PC software. To be truly equivalent, the Amiga would also have to run PC software - IOW it would have to be a PC.

But if by 'equivalent' you mean able to get the same functionality and enjoyment of it, then the Amiga wasn't that far off. It just depends on what you can accept as equivalent.

As I was the one who made this statement of the equivalent PC several times, let me clarify it. As it may indeed not have been clear enough.

When I talk about "equivalent PC's", I'm simply talking about PC's that roughly have the same capabilities as the Amiga 1200. Meaning: comparable (perceived) speed, comparable graphics, comparable sound. Crucially, I was mostly talking about PC's on release of the A1200. Not PC's in 1994 onwards as the whole market was changing very rapidly in the early 90's.

Case in point: in 1990, a computer with 512-1024KB of RAM and a sub-10MHz processor would still mostly be up to date. By 1995, the Pentium Pro and Playstation had come out, processor speeds were closer to 100MHz and the average amount of memory in a computer was closer to 4-8MB. There was a massive leap forward in those five or so years.

With that in mind, let's examine what I would call an equivalent PC. That is: the 386SX.

This was the kind of machine the A1200 actually competed with, as they both represented the low end* of computing at the time. Most of these 386SX machines were shipped with 2MB of RAM and a slow, generally on board VGA/Super VGA card that normally struggled to do 800x600 at anything approaching a decent speed. They did normally come with a hard disk, though.

Compared to that type of machine, the A1200 is pretty much on par for processing speed (the 386SX was much slower than it's MHz rating suggested), exactly on par for memory and roughly on par for graphics. It was actually slightly better for graphics in some ways (there was no HAM-8 equivalent and AGA usually performed better in the lower resolutions that games used than those on board cards did), but also slightly worse in others - there was no real equivalent to the 1024x768 mode for AGA. Not that a 386SX could really use such a mode, it simply was too slow and there was no software that really used it anyway.

The A1200 also came with built-in sound, which was still somewhat rare in budget PC land.

*) Note: there were lower spec PC's still on the market, but they were as out of date as the A500 was by then. The 386SX was the "budget PC" of the time.


-----
So why not compare the A1200 to a 386DX or 486? Well, the reason is simple. At the time of release, a 386DX with proper SVGA on a card was still really quite expensive. IMHO, comparing an A1200 to mid-to-high end PC (price wise) is quite silly for rather obvious reasons. It's like taking that 386SX I talked about above, trying to upgrade it to run DOOM well and then complaining that it's so expensive to do so. Well no shit, Sherlock - you bought a budget machine. What exactly did you expect?

Expanding the A1200 down the line to compete with a 386DX machine would indeed have been expensive. But it would not have been "far beyond the price" of a 386DX in 1992. We've actually seen the cost of buying and upgrading an A1200 in this thread and this totalled around the cost of 386SX in 1992. For an end result that is actually closer to a 486SX in all but perhaps the graphics card department (A 68030@50MHz is roughly comparable with a 25Mhz 486SX or a hypothetical, non existent 386DX@50MHz).


-----
On the topic of RTG in an A1200.

Requiring the A1200 to have RTG is clearly a red herring, as the A1200's AGA chipset actually competed fairly well with SVGA as sold in 1992/1993. Not to mention people generally opted for cheaper SVGA cards that were mostly 'impressive on paper'. They offered resolutions that were essentially unusable in practice. Resolutions that had effectively zero software support to boot (even if you did get a more expensive, faster SVGA card). To top it off, these cheaper card were also really slow and generally lacked the memory to actually run the higher resolutions.

The A1200 was also not designed to be capable of having a graphics card upgrade. This means that adding it as a requirement is not only silly, but it's clearly and rather transparently meant to artificially and disingenuously boost the A1200 upgrade price beyond reason, as the only ones made available required a lot of other expensive hardware to go alongside. Such as the BlizzardVision for the PPC cards. These things were not designed to compete with a silly 386/486, it was stuff designed to let your A1200 compete with Pentium II's.

If you went that route, it actually mostly did work out - if you look at it from a performance perspective. Though not so much from a software support perspective and certainly not from a price point perspective (though the latter is not so odd considering what you're trying to do here).The mere fact you could actually put a card in your A1200 back in the late 1990's that made it as fast or faster than a current PC was really impressive and shows that the A1200 was actually a very good design, considering how cheap it was. No 386SX or DX did that

Originally Posted by Hewitson

- Resolution
- Speed
- Colour depth (HAM doesn't count)

Basically what I'm saying is, that even the shittest PC video cards blew AGA out of the water.

Ok, now I am sure. Wasn't before, but it's clear now. You're just making shit up. The above statement is total rubbish. All of it is false.

Cheap SVGA cards in the early 1990's did not come with 15/16/24 bit capabilities and I don't buy you don't know this. Cheap SVGA cards were also slower than AGA. And no, I don't buy into you not knowing this either.
Cheap SVGA cards topped out at resolutions that were essentially identical to AGA. You also know this.

Kindly stop lying.
Edit: Forget I said that last bit, it's not important enough to start an argument over.

[Foebane]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

- Resolution
- Speed
- Colour depth (HAM doesn't count)

Basically what I'm saying is, that even the shittest PC video cards blew AGA out of the water.

- Resolution
I thought SVGA was 640x480 (which AGA can handle easily) and the later modes like 800x600 were VESA modes?

- Speed
Agreed. I personally remember trying to use Workbench in 256 colours on my real A1200 back in the day, and it was incredibly slow and flickery, but that's what happens when you use separated bitplanes and it requires eight instructions to set the bits to video memory rather than just one, as in SVGA, or at most 3 for 24-bit colour. As I remember a conversation I had with someone at college:
"Why 256 colours?"
"A byte per pixel"
That's all it really needed, but bitplanes, just for the sake of old-fashioned scrolling games, really made things more complicated than they needed to be.

- Colour depth
As fiddly as HAM is, I still think it was a good idea for still images, especially in high-res. Of course, it's really not practical for games or moving objects all over the screen.

[Dunny]

Originally Posted by roondar

Kindly stop lying.

Hewitson is going through some things right now, so he's not in a good place. At best, he's trolling. Just ignore him for now until he's better.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Foebane

- Resolution
I thought SVGA was 640x480 (which AGA can handle easily) and the later modes like 800x600 were VESA modes?

By 1992, most (but not all) SVGA cards could do 800x600 or even 1024x768. Still only in 8 bit colour though. And the really cheap and shitty ones did not do 1024x768 (or only in 16 colours).

- Speed
Agreed. I personally remember trying to use Workbench in 256 colours on my real A1200 back in the day, and it was incredibly slow and flickery, but that's what happens when you use separated bitplanes and it requires eight instructions to set the bits to video memory rather than just one, as in SVGA, or at most 3 for 24-bit colour. As I remember a conversation I had with someone at college:
"Why 256 colours?"
"A byte per pixel"
That's all it really needed, but bitplanes, just for the sake of old-fashioned scrolling games, really made things more complicated than they needed to be.

This is only true when you set single pixels. If you do what was actually done in the OS or in games, you set 16, 32, 64 or even more pixels at a time. Doing so bitplanes are as fast as doing a similar block move would be using a chunky display mode. The only speed advantage that really exists is for those chunky effect (i.e. do things on a pixel per pixel basis) and other things where you're changing extremely small numbers of pixels at a time.

I'll grant the flickeryness, but that IMHO is more of a design flaw. Using double buffering would've fixed it.

As for AGA vs cheap and shitty SVGA - you must have never used a crappy SVGA card. I did, it was just as slow or slower as AGA for screen updates in higher resolutions (meaning anything over 320x240). I remember playing Scorched Earth with a friend on his 386DX/40 and SVGA card and it was slow as molasses. Flood fills on my A500 were significantly faster.

- Colour depth
As fiddly as HAM is, I still think it was a good idea for still images, especially in high-res. Of course, it's really not practical for games or moving objects all over the screen.

HAM8 is not a bad compromise and it exceeded SVGA abilities in 1992 handily.

Originally Posted by Dunny

Hewitson is going through some things right now, so he's not in a good place. At best, he's trolling. Just ignore him for now until he's better.

I sincerely hope he recovers and will try to not make things worse.

[gimbal]

Originally Posted by Foebane

- Resolution
I thought SVGA was 640x480 (which AGA can handle easily) and the later modes like 800x600 were VESA modes?

Well, no. Its not a name for a resolution.

[Foebane]

Thanks for the info, Roondar!

Well, no. Its not a name for a resolution.

No, I didn't mean the resolution was that name, I meant I thought it was the highest resolution it offered.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by roondar

Ok, now I am sure. Wasn't before, but it's clear now. You're just making shit up. The above statement is total rubbish. All of it is false.

Cheap SVGA cards in the early 1990's did not come with 15/16/24 bit capabilities and I don't buy you don't know this. Cheap SVGA cards were also slower than AGA. And no, I don't buy into you not knowing this either.
Cheap SVGA cards topped out at resolutions that were essentially identical to AGA. You also know this.

Kindly stop lying.
Edit: Forget I said that last bit, it's not important enough to start an argument over.

I'm not interested in arguing with you, I respect you too much for that.

In my experience, the main limitation of these early SVGA cards was lack of memory. Not speed.

800x600 (or even 640x480) is far better than AGA's usable resolutions (non-interlaced). Whether it is better or worse than the interlaced modes is irrelevant, unless you like headaches.

Originally Posted by Foebane

I thought SVGA was 640x480 (which AGA can handle easily) and the later modes like 800x600 were VESA modes?

If AGA is able to handle 640x480 so easily then why did anyone bother with RTG?

Originally Posted by Foebane

Agreed. I personally remember trying to use Workbench in 256 colours on my real A1200 back in the day, and it was incredibly slow and flickery

Exactly. Similar modes would have been perfectly usable on a 386 with a crappy Trident or whatever VGA card.

Originally Posted by roondar

HAM8 is not a bad compromise and it exceeded SVGA abilities in 1992 handily.

Did it exceed the abilities of it? Yes, it did. Did it exceed the usefulness of it? Since it's basically unusable for games, the answer would have to be no.

Originally Posted by roondar

I sincerely hope he recovers and will try to not make things worse.

Thanks for the kind words, mate.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

I'm not interested in arguing with you, I respect you too much for that.

The main limitation of these early SVGA cards was lack of memory. Not speed.

800x600 (or even 640x480) is far better than AGA's usable resolutions (non-interlaced). Whether it is better or worse than the interlaced modes is irrelevant, unless you like headaches.

I don't want to argue either.

But the above is simply not my experience, for the low end crappy cards. I've had the 'pleasure' of using one of those 'cheap and crappy' SVGA cards and it was not faster than AGA. I've also seen Windows 3.11 'draw' windows slowly (similar to AGA in 256 colour mode) on cards like that when running 800x600 or even 640x480 at times.

Look, there were Super VGA cards that were faster than AGA at any resolution. This is true. But they were not the 'cheap and crappy' ones. They were the more expensive ones that you didn't get with the budget PC's. As far as I remember some of those cards cost a pretty significant fraction of the A1200 by themselves.

As for AGA, I found DBLPAL/DBLNTSC & Productivity mode to be quite usable and think those shouldn't give anyone a headache. And again, in my experience those were not any slower than the type of card I'm talking about. Slower than a good card, say, a Matrox card? Sure. Slower than crappy on-board SVGA such as those budget 386SX machines offered? Not as far as I've seen, those really were terrible.

Exactly. The same modes would have been perfectly usable on a 386 with a crappy Trident or whatever VGA card.

See, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're just misremembering. Standard VGA@640x480x256 was really, really slow. It actually stole bus cycles from the pc in a very similar way to the OCS Amiga hires mode and ended up making the machine crawl. Which is why on VGA cards people ran Windows in 16 colour mode.

Edit: I need to clarify something here. I made VGA cycle stealing sound worse that it was by the 386 era. What I wrote was 100% true for the early VGA cards, but by the 1990's things had improved. What I should've written was that VGA can steal cycles from the PC. And running it in 640x480x256 while trying to update large parts of the screen with new information was one of the situations where this happened. Merely having a still image, or not doing much to the screen meant the PC ran a lot faster. That said, standard VGA and 640x480 were not a good combination.

SVGA did better here, sure. But even here it was not 'good'. AFAIK people around me didn't actually run Windows in 256 colour mode until a few years later and even then they tended to stuck to 640x480. And this had a lot to do with usability concerns - it really was slow. Like I said, I've seen it do the 'draw a window, slowly' thing many times.

Remember, this is 1992 we're talking about. Not 1996 (by which time you're obviously 100% correct). Things moved very fast back then.

Did it exceed the abilities of it? Yes, it did. Did it exceed the usefulness of it? Since it's basically unusable for games, the answer would have to be no.

The same was true for 15/16/24 bit SVGA graphics when first available though. These modes were primarily used for stills, games on PC ran in 256 colour mode until the late 1990's (as in, 1996-7 onwards). I don't really agree here, if usefulness for games is all that counts then every single PC out there at the time only had one useful resolution: 320x240x256

[Bruce Abbott]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

At a far lower resolution that was nowhere near as good as what a PC of the time could offer.

Here we go again, defining 'as good as as' to mean whatever the PC had. Could a typical PC VGA card output high quality composite video to a TV? Were 29" VGA monitors available at any price? How stupid would a tiny VGA monitor look surrounded by speakers 5 times its size in my living room? And before you suggest that I just didn't know what I was missing, I also had an A3000 with RTG card hooked up to a 17" SVGA monitor. Fine for some stuff, but it just didn't have the same impact as the 29" TV and sound system.

Kickstart != OS. AmigaOS 3.x is pretty unusable without a HD.

Complete nonsense. Unlike Windows, AmigaOS3.0 is quite usable without a hard drive. Only one floppy is needed for booting and running Workbench (which it does faster than MSDOS on a Pentium PC). I have a bare A1200 motherboard which I use for testing code. Perfectly usable with nothing but a power supply, floppy drive, and mouse. Try that with Windows on a PC!

Again, AGA can't compare to SVGA in terms of functionality, usability, or productivity.

You are right - SVGA was pretty much useless for any serious video work. Or were you talking about some other kind of 'productivity'? In 1992 most business software ran in DOS, because text mode was more usable and productive.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Here we go again, defining 'as good as as' to mean whatever the PC had. Could a typical PC VGA card output high quality composite video to a TV?

No, but neither could the Commodore A520.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Were 29" VGA monitors available at any price?

Probably. Very uncommon of course.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

How stupid would a tiny VGA monitor look surrounded by speakers 5 times its size in my living room? And before you suggest that I just didn't know what I was missing, I also had an A3000 with RTG card hooked up to a 17" SVGA monitor. Fine for some stuff, but it just didn't have the same impact as the 29" TV and sound system.

If we were just talking about games then I'd agree.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Complete nonsense. Unlike Windows, AmigaOS3.0 is quite usable without a hard drive. Only one floppy is needed for booting and running Workbench (which it does faster than MSDOS on a Pentium PC).

Booting the Workbench disk is much different to having a complete installation of the OS available.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

I have a bare A1200 motherboard which I use for testing code. Perfectly usable with nothing but a power supply, floppy drive, and mouse. Try that with Windows on a PC!

I'm sure Windows 1.0 would be capable of doing it.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

You are right - SVGA was pretty much useless for any serious video work.

Couldn't agree more.

Originally Posted by Bruce Abbott

Or were you talking about some other kind of 'productivity'? In 1992 most business software ran in DOS, because text mode was more usable and productive.

Most business software had made the switch to Windows by then.

[Hewitson]

Originally Posted by roondar

See, don't take this the wrong way, but I think you're just misremembering. Standard VGA@640x480x256 was really, really slow. It actually stole bus cycles from the pc in a very similar way to the OCS Amiga hires mode and ended up making the machine crawl. Which is why on VGA cards people ran Windows in 16 colour mode.

Maybe you're right. I'm happy to be proven wrong. Maybe this is something that could be tested in PCem or similar emulator? Or does anyone have an old 386 laying around?

Originally Posted by roondar

Remember, this is 1992 we're talking about. Not 1996 (by which time you're obviously 100% correct). Things moved very fast back then.

They did. That's why I'm starting to doubt myself now.

Originally Posted by roondar

The same was true for 15/16/24 bit SVGA graphics when first available though. These modes were primarily used for stills, games on PC ran in 256 colour mode until the late 1990's (as in, 1996-7 onwards). I don't really agree here, if usefulness for games is all that counts then every single PC out there at the time only had one useful resolution: 320x240x256

That's a very valid point.

[Foebane]

I remember Windows being very slow on older VGA cards, too. In fact, I remember reading about how the redrawing of windows was so slow, that they designed newer (S)VGA cards to draw the windows in hardware instead of software, thus accelerating it. I don't know if they called it anything specific, but I think the hardware remains to this day, thus enabling the instantaneous dragging of windows even in HD resolutions that keep the contents visible, rather than a temporary outline.

[d4rk3lf]

Just watching some Sony Playstation videos, and seeing how many effort Sony made to advertise the console, and to get contracts with developers (How many games were ready even before Sony is released? ), so I think, that even more contributed to the Playstation fame and glory, then the great architecture it posses.

That leads me to conclusion: If Commodore had something like Playstation in 1992-3, they would fail, because of their crappy marketing, and the way how they look on the market.

[d4rk3lf]

Originally Posted by activist

But were you disappointed with the A1200 when you bought it back in 1992?

I was fairly late introduced to Amiga world (1993-94), so I am not an representative guy that can talk about it.
I was introduced with A500, and because I had C64, and more importantly, a friend with 386, I was very impressed with A500. Long waiting times, some people mention here, were (for me) a blessing, because, with C64 I had even longer waiting times, and many times, game failed to load.
I bought (my parents actually) my first Amiga (1200) at end of 1996. I was so happy.
95% of A500 games worked (no matter what Hewitson say), also, compared to my friend 386, even A500 games were awesome (no matter what Hewitson say).

Today, I think that it was a pretty cool machine, but as many guys quoted famous sentence "too little, to late", I can agree to that.
However, I think A1200 (and all Aga machines), had a great potential overall, and is very important part of Amiga history.

[roondar]

Originally Posted by Hewitson

Maybe you're right. I'm happy to be proven wrong. Maybe this is something that could be tested in PCem or similar emulator? Or does anyone have an old 386 laying around?

They did. That's why I'm starting to doubt myself now.

To be fair, after reading this response I started having doubts myself. So I went and Googled around for a bit. Sorry for the wall of text, but I do feel it's on topic because of the whole AGA vs SVGA thing that is a part of A1200 vs PC. Consider it aimed at everyone wanting to know this and not at you personally

What I found was the following:

• There were two types of bus in common use at that time: ISA and VESA Local Bus. The latter was much, much faster than the former but was only available on some of the more expensive 486 machines.
• There were three types of SVGA controllers common in 1992/1993
• The three types of SVGA controllers were: dumb frame buffer, fixed function and fully fledged graphics processors
• Dumb framebuffer SVGA cards using ISA were known to be (very) slow, requiring the CPU to do all the work and transfer the result to the SVGA card over a slow bus. According to Infoworld, these cards were essentially so slow that they were only really a good option for people mainly using non-graphics business software, or black and white DTP.
• Fixed function cards were much faster and had things like line drawing and a Blitter built-in (sounds familiar ). They were very useful and nice and zippy in practice, though they did require special drivers and were only fast if the data fit in video RAM. They were also quite a bit more expensive. As far as I could find, these did accelerate DOS games as well, but only if the DOS game had a proper VESA driver included.
• Graphics co-processor SVGA cards used chips like the TMS34010/34020 and were blazingly fast as long as all data needed fit in video memory. Otherwise they, like the fixed function cards, were no faster than standard frame buffer cards. They were also rather expensive. Again, they also accelerated DOS games - but again only if the DOS game had a compatible VESA driver included with it.
• I also found some posts on a PC forum, where they quoted a PC magazine talking in early 1993 about a frame buffer SVGA card from Trident and apparently it said "we have to mention again, that this chip and also the cards that make use of it, are ancient and suitable only for upgrading 286 systems graphics cards, for our kids to play PacMan. The limitation of the 8bit DAC to only 256 color doesn't bother us so much, as even in that case you have to wait for a century for a window to move".

Note here that the user posting this did not provide a link to the magazine in question so I can't verify the veracity of this claim. The rest of the forum thread did concur that cheap Trident and OAK cards were pretty terrible and did a bad job at both Windows and DOS games.

• That said, there were also some posts about Cirrus Logic SVGA cards that apparently were better and also found on occasion in those cheaper 386's, though this was in 1993 and not 1992.
• ISA can theoretically do about 8MB/seconds, which is somewhat higher than the 7MB/sec AGA offers. However, on the flip side of that, AGA is fairly smart at how it shares the bus with the 68020 in the A1200 (if the Blitter isn't allowed to hog the bus and faster display fetching is used). AGA also allows the CPU to write four bytes in a cycle to chip memory, rather than one or two bytes at a time for ISA. Meaning that in practice AGA probably has more actual bandwidth available for the CPU & Blitter than a cheap ISA SVGA card gives a 386SX (which itself is limited to 16 bit memory accesses).

This fits with both the forum thread I found and Infoworlds description of what happens when the colour depth/resolution went up for the cheap SVGA cards on a slow 386.

On a personal note, I do actually agree that using a 7-8MB/sec bus for 800x600x256 graphics is going to suck. Let alone 1024x768. Even a 640x480x256 mode will be pretty slow with such a slow bus. Thinking back, I'm pretty sure I ran my A1200 in 64 colours DBLPAL and not 256.

Overall, I'd say that both of us were kind of right and kind of wrong. There clearly were cheap and terrible ISA SVGA cards on the market that, coupled with a 386SX, led to some pretty bad performance. On the flip side, there also were much faster SVGA cards available, even for ISA (though loading in new data for such accelerated cards would still be limited to 8MB/sec top end). Which you ended up getting in an over the counter PC seemingly was a matter of price and some luck.

A final note: Infoworld points out in the same article there were quite a few driver issues with newer cards that offered acceleration.

I attached a screen shot or two from the Infoworld article. It's a bit of an odd article, as it effectively both says "they're too slow for colour/graphics use" and "they have acceptable performance" about the un-accelerated SVGA cards. Perhaps this is because Infoworld was primarily aimed at the business side of things and as such didn't care about games or flashy graphics?