While the Amiga CPUs were likely slower than a 486, I don't see why the Amiga version would have had a fraction of digitized sounds and essentially no music when almost every other Amiga game had those in spades. It sounds like Dune 2 was a lazy port by programmers new to the system and didn't understand how to make use of its power.
What graphics acceleration did Dune 2 support or did it only support un-accelerated VGA or SVGA? If it was un-accelerated, as was common on the 486, the Amiga's GPU should have helped the Amiga's slower CPU keep up as the CPU wouldn't have to handle the graphics work.
As for swapping floppies, was the game not installable to a hard drive? I'm sure the PC version would have required lots of floppy swapping as well if it even supported that option.
It really sounds to me like Dune 2 was a lazy port.
90% or more of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 1 megabyte of RAM. A large fraction of commercial Amiga games targeted an A500 with 0.5 megabyte of RAM.
Unfortunately, greater, better tricked out Amigas never sold in the numbers required to make them a commercial target. By 1992, it was apparent that things were not only tough, but a disaster. (Saying that as a die-hard fan.)
Then it seemed that most of the top Amiga development talent focused their efforts on trying to imitate Doom on the Amiga, with minimal success, rather than making the most of what AGA Amigas were actually capable of.
I wouldn't be surprised if EA abandoned the Amiga more because Trip Hawkins left in 1991 than because developing houses were abandoning the Amiga.
The largest number of Amiga games was in 1990 when it nearly tied with DOS, which was 4 years older than the Amiga and the Amiga games didn't really get rolling until the Amiga 500 in 1988.
7MHz for the 68000 on the Amiga vs 33MHz on the 486. I also saw it running on 386s at the time and it really wasn't quite enough, so CPU was certainly a factor.
But the killer was RAM no doubt. 1MB on the Amiga, while my PC had 4MB. Under DOS you absolutely had to make sure the RAM was available to the game if you wanted all the digitized sounds and music.
In these days it would have been entirely software rendering. The Amiga had 32 colours available, while I'm sure Dune 2 ran VGA on the PC. I remember them both looking quite similar though as the sandy theme was forgiving.
The DOS version had no floppy option as a HDD was expected. Few people were lucky enough to own a HDD on the Amiga.
By the time enough people had a 486 to play games, Amigas were faster than a 7 MHz 68000 and had more RAM as well. You are unfairly comparing a 1988 computer to a 1993 PC, you might as well be comparing C64 to a PS5. Apples and oranges. A 1988 PC couldn't do it as well as a 1993 PC either.
Amigas by then also had the AGA chipset which could do 256 colours from a palette of 16.7 million colors. Your memories seem to be out of sync.
Lots of Amigas in 1993 had hard drives. Your comment is a really poorly researched.
The Amiga had a GPU which could throw pixels around without the CPU needing to do much, but for 3D games, lots of floating point calculations had to be made. The Motorola CPUs often didn't have FPUs while the 486 had it built into every one. The 486 came out at just the right time for Doom to be workable.
Commodore failed to get the AAA chipset done because Irving Gould defunded the R&D department years before.
Comment about the HDDs wasn't poorly researched - it wasn't researched at all. It's from personal experience. I'm not saying PCs were "better computers" than Amigas, or trying to frame a fair comparison. The post is about what happened to the Amiga, and the fact is it wasn't able to compete with the pace of IBM compatibles as they caught up with it in graphics and sound capabilities. It is indeed a lot like comparing the Amiga to the C64.
Nitpick: the 486 had versions without FPUs, or which had them disabled. I had a 486 SX 25Mhz.
"Because Doom was written to run on early 386 and 486 processors which often lacked a floating-point unit entirely, and its use was slow even when present, the game was written to exclusively use fixed point math." [0]
What graphics acceleration did Dune 2 support or did it only support un-accelerated VGA or SVGA? If it was un-accelerated, as was common on the 486, the Amiga's GPU should have helped the Amiga's slower CPU keep up as the CPU wouldn't have to handle the graphics work.
As for swapping floppies, was the game not installable to a hard drive? I'm sure the PC version would have required lots of floppy swapping as well if it even supported that option.
It really sounds to me like Dune 2 was a lazy port.