I think the NES's PPU is a lot more powerful in some ways than the C64 VIC-II chip. The NES's PPU supports multiple background layers, priority, pixel collision detection and has up to 64 sprites on screen at once - albeit with some limitations on how many are on each scanline. The VIC-II can only do 8 sprites at a time without scanline raster tricks (and if we count those the NES can do more than 64 too)