VGA came out in 1987 with the release of the IBM PS/2 series. That’s when PC graphics surpassed the Amiga in terms of onscreen colours and resolution. The Mac II also gained 256-colour graphics in 1988.

Of course VGA cards didn’t support hardware scrolling and sprites like the Amiga did, so the Amiga remained the better option for side-scrolling shoot ’em ups and platform games.

The early 90s began the transition to 3d graphics so the brute power of the 486 and Pentium mattered more than the Amiga’s support for 2d hardware sprites. John Carmack famously dismissed the Amiga’s potential for a port of Doom and it was game over for Commodore’s machine.

when did pc first have gpu?

I’ve seen lots of interesting analyses on forums and by a few YouTubers which suggest an Amiga 1200 was still value for money compared to a 386 PC in 1993.

The problem was, by that stage the Amiga had clearly lost its edge in graphics and sound as a gaming platform even compared to a Super Nintendo, leave alone a relatively expensive 386 PC with SVGA and a Soundblaster.

I think 1991 was the critical year. By that stage, 256-colour VGA games were becoming the norm on PC. Impressive titles appeared on DOS in 1992 which never made it to the Amiga, like Ultima Underworld and X Wing. And what did Commodore do? Release the A600 – the same old ECS tech and 7Mhz processor. OK they got AGA out of the door later in the year, but it was too little too late.

There’s no date we all woke up and PCs were better than Amigas. It was a gradual thing. An Amiga could give a 386SX PC with VGA and an Ad Lib a run for its money, and keep in mind this was 1985 technology fighting 1988 technology. A 486 with a 16-bit Soundblaster and Super VGA had enough power all around to out-muscle the pre-AGA Amigas, once there was software that took advantage of it. But the PC was relying a lot on that 486 processor, a mainstream Amiga was still running comparatively weaker CPUs, because it had so much coprocessing. I’ve written dozens of blog posts about what made the Amiga special, maybe you should read them. I’m not going to rehash it all here in a comment.

I’d imagine Office for Windows 3.0 would be better than anything Amiga or Atari has, though there’s also word and excel for Macintosh.

when did super VGA graphics and PC sound cards surpass the Amiga, and which Intel CPU was faster than Amiga CPU’s?

I’ve read that it was DOOM on a Pentium with its FPU that finally destroyed Amiga. certainly 3Dfx and 16 bit sound cards surpass Amiga graphics and sound, especially with 3d first person shooters that wiped out Amiga and Atari leaving only Macintosh

Commodore UK marketing chief David Pleasance deserves a lot of credit for turning the tables on the ST with his infamous bundle packs. But perhaps the release of the visually-stunning “Shadow of the Beast” in 1989 also had a lot to do with it. By the time I got my Amiga in 89/90 I remember the ST was generally seen as the poor relation.

Interestingly Commodore engineer Jeff Porter, the man behind the A500, denies its wedge case was inspired by the ST. He says it was instead derived from the C128. And the original Amiga development team in Los Gatos really didn’t like the idea of putting the Amiga in an all-in-one wedge unit.