I think PowerVR was a good choice even at the time. In my teens, my older brother worked at a computer shop and back then was a hardware geek, and a Matrox M3D

I think PowerVR was a good choice even at the time. In my teens, my older brother worked at a computer shop and back then was a hardware geek, and a Matrox M3D, and frankly compared to something like a Rush or Riva 128 the M3D was pretty good outside of some blending moire. That I'm talking about visual vs perf says something... and Dreamcast got the version AFTER that... The biggest thing was their Tile based deferred rendering, which made it easy to create an efficient GPU with a relatively low transistor count. Also, 3dfx pattern of 'chip per function', aside from it's future scaling issues, would have been a higher BOM. ----- All of that said, ever wonder what the video game scene, or NVidia would be like today, if the latter didn't derp out on their shot at the Dreamcast in an SEC filing, which caused them to be relegated to the video chip for the Pico?