Still remember enjoying Descent. And how I argued with Commodore staff at conferences on why Amigas didn't move into hardware 3d as it was the clear future to see.
In 90-91 ish they had a prototype AAA architecture and the specs were great. (3000+). PC's had caught up some way.
Instead management pushed a cheap, horrible, slower machine with none of the features, no SCSI II but CPU driven IDE and AGA in place of AAA. No DSP or voice recognition. No 16 bit Paula. That was A4000.
Then in 93(?) there was the planned 3D PowerPC reboot as PCs had finally caught up with AAA! Then they were no more.
Was really depressing going to DevCons and getting all the NDA info in this period.
From what I remember it was more like my Retina Z3 card but better. Had some discussions at conferences, it seemed Amiga hardware engineers didn't believe in 3D and were frozen in their graphics mindset of blitter and copper (huge when I wrote 68k demos in the mid-80s, but meaningless when 3D happened).
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amiga_Advanced_Architecture_ch...
With chunky graphics, you can write out an entire pixel with a single write, which is essential for rasterisation in software 3d games.
It's not like PCs got 3d graphics cards until late-95, the AAA chipsets released in 1993 might have allowed the Amega to hold on until 96, get proper Doom clones (and maybe even quake clones) and then get it's own 3d accelerators.
Which is the reason that 3D gaming took really off with chipsets that support software rendering instead of GPUs.
The PS1 and the CD32 are around the same time and show how Commodore had no clue about 3D, but Sony delivered (Also Nintendo with the Super FX).
3D was in Hombre that was the PowerPC. Wildly different and no compatibility, so heaven knows how that would have played out. Only that was when we were all starting to play Doom at work :)
Edit: I searched and found this from Dave Haynie - who always seemed pretty straight talking. Weirdly some of the dates have 10 years added :D The 3D section and the following on Gould and Ali seems to sum up the train wreck pretty well. eg:
"When he got to Engineering, he hired a human bus error called Bill Sydnes to take over. Sydnes, a PC guy, didn’t have the chops to run a computer, much less a computer design department. He was also an ex-IBMer, and spent much time trying to turn C= (a fairly slick, west-coast-style design operation), into the clunky mess that characterized the Dilbert Zones in most major east-coast-style companies"
This killed the Amiga.