Did the Amiga 500 have better graphics than the PCs of the early 90’s? Because those graphics look a bit better than Wolfenstein 3D.
It led to the odd situation where you had PC's that had these killer CPU's but everything else about the system was holding them back. The Amiga had an average CPU (8Mhz 68K) but everything else was picking up a lot of slack.
As for this example, this is exceptionally good for the Amiga. I don't recall there being anything even remotely close to this in its time. Hackers are just gonna optimise way beyond reason and I love it.
This engine very likely is written in hand optimized, clock-exact, asm.
Additionally, anybody that grew up coding on the Amiga has had 30, 35 years to think about it since! - and they are probably still young enough (or, more accurately, probably not yet properly old enough...) that time has, for now, added more to their abilities than it has taken away.
And: modern PCs are ridiculously fast! A table or routine that would have taken your Amiga days to produce, even assuming you'd have considered the idea feasible in the first place ("b-but - you'd need a temporary 512 MByte table for that!!") can be generated in 5 minutes with some python code on your 10 year old laptop.
I mean things like Commander Keen were considered really decent for side scrolling graphics on PC but would be seen as trivial on a system like the Amiga and maybe even the NES using early 80's tech. It was a long time until the PC could scroll graphics as smoothly as the NES could with Super Mario in 1985. Custom ASIC designs just had to so leverage back then. It is something we are moving back into nowadays with chiplet designs and SoC's in general. Just look at the processor blow outs on something like the M1/M2 to see this.
This new engine is an absolute masterpiece of Amiga coding. The many mid-90s attempts to do similar things tended to need more powerful Amigas (at least an A1200, preferably with an 030 or better accelerator card and extra RAM) for less impressive results.
For smooth frame synced 2D games (no lag, no jitterynes, no tearing) Amiga was hands down better, but those kinds of games were falling out of style in the early 90s.
As for me, VGA was wonder, I now think from marketing considerations, PCs way was to make Super-EGA, with little colors, but high resolution. But, sometimes wonders happen.
Amigas, or to be more exact, Commodore computers, from beginning made as home computers, with decent integrated graphics and sound.
Unfortunately, Amiga parent company was very aggressive against clones, and from what I hear, was not effectively managed (or may be, just tried to made too complex architecture). So after some time, initial superiority was lost, and PCs not just dominated market, but also, once become better technically (because of constant competition on free market).
Approx after 1987-middle 1990s, Amiga become technically lagged behind forever, then parent company bankrupt and now, each year, Amigas become more history artifacts.
Part of it is surely that I was using hand-me-down PCs and there was probably some time lag on the games that my dad would get through the sneaker-net.
The art style is also really solid and modern which I’m sure helps hide some of the limitations.