AGA, the chipset in the A1200, was a stopgap produced because the originally intended graphic chipset, started in 1988, had been beleaguered by delay, in part because of severe underfunding of R&D, and they needed what was effectively a quick and dirty intermediate hack fast.
The "AAA" chipset that was intended to be the next generation, and which had e.g. chunky graphics modes and massively upgraded memory bandwidth and blitter speeds etc., and would've made all the difference for things like Doom, never made it out the door. The project was entirely cancelled in '93, as they concluded PC's would catch up to AAA by the time it'd be finished.
Instead, after AGA, Commodore tried one last ditch attempt and got frustratingly close to getting a massively upgraded design w/3D acceleration, up to 32 bit chunky modes and built to scale from being a standalone system (with an on-chipset PA-RISC CPU) to be licensed for consoles and set top boxes, to a chipset for an upgraded Amiga, with an option to also sell it as a high end graphics card.
[Of course, whether any of that would have saved Commodore was another matter - without a severe overhaul of corporate culture, it was just a question of time; Commodore had basically never, through it's entire existence, even as it rapidly grew in the 8-bit days, been more than one unresolved crisis away from collapse]
Further, Commodore made a big bet on the CD32 but 3DO was already out there, Sega Saturn was coming out and PlayStation was looming (and would have finished Commodore off had it lived another year)
Like Atari Corporation, Commodore failed to innovate enough and the result was not unexpected.
But the CD32 is little more than a CDTV-like variant of the A1200 with a quick and dirty attempt at mitigating the by then disastrous miscalculation of not having any chunky modes in AGA by adding chunk-to-planar conversion in hardware into Akiko (CD32 specific chip that otherwise served to cost-reduce a bunch of glue logic and controllers for the CD-ROM and game ports), but it was very basic (write 32 8-bit chunky pixels to Akiko registers; read 8 32-bit words for 8-bitplanes worth of 32 pixels back out).
I played the hell out of the Syndicate demo on my Amiga, maybe you’re thinking of something else? It was a ton more playable on there than any of the Amiga attempts at Doom clones of the time, thats for sure.
There was definitely a point where PCs left the Amiga in the dust and it was around the time VGA and better started happening though. The A1000 was an amazing beast when it came out but Commodore basically sat on their ass when it came to improving the thing.
Yes but by that time you had other home computing platforms like the Acorn Archimedes, arguably the next evolutionary step in the home computing niche. x86 hardware would've been very expensive at the time and mostly used for business purposes, not in the home.
I remember - as an Amiga user - cheekily pitching software upgrades to Acorn to help address the massive shortcomings we saw in RiscOS compared to AmigaOS. Even ca. 1996, a couple of years after Commodore's device, we were still smug about how much better we saw the Amiga as being.
We were willing to accept the hardware wasn't bad, but the Amiga userbase never really considered the Archimedes in the same ballpark as an overall system.
Impression Publisher ran rings around every DTP package on the Amiga. It was an all around better machine, for those kind of tasks. I still miss the Draw program that was included in the ROM (!) of RiscOS.
But alas, the PC made it all history. And while I'm happy with my current hardware, it sure isn't as exiting as the older era...
It also looked a lot nicer as it ran in 640xsomething mode (640x400 or 640x480 I assume).
Perhaps it was a lot better on an A1200. The 68020 is also a much better CPU than the 68000.
Amiga had good 3D games before the PC; breakthroughs like DOOM happened when the company was already on its way down, after a number of wrong strategic turns - including an unwillingness to foster a liberal ecosystem of third-party add-on manufacturers, which was what eventually dragged the IBM-PC into modern multimedia.