> They use to stay way ahead in the 90's 80's, at least 2 years ahead i think or more, > not even the Sega 32x could do ports of games form the mid to late 80's without some > sacrifices to the animation.
Because Intel and Nvidia and AMD all have staffs of tens of thousands of people working on advancing CPU and GPU power, and they can recover the R&D costs by selling literally millions of units. No arcade maker can compete with that, and even Sony/Nintendo could only try in a brief window.
Back in the 1980s graphics was strictly the domain of games; the original Macintosh was considered unbusinesslike by many because it had a bitmapped display for its GUI instead of the CGA/EGA text mode popular with PC business apps of the time. So of course the game makers were well ahead of PCs. Once Windows 3.x and the Windows versions of Word/Excel/PowerPoint started taking off and removed that stigma, PC makers started trying to do fast graphics, although 3dfx were the first to actually succeed at it in a useful-for-gaming way.
Also, the 32X could've done games with more frames of animation, but cartridge ROM was still very, very expensive at that time.
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