The Neon 250 thus had only a fraction of the Dreamcast CLX2's fillrate and rendering performance. The PowerVR2 was also optimized for the Hitachi SH-4's geometry processing capabilities (rather than for a Pentium II or III), while PC drivers and software were not optimized for the Neon 250's tiled rendering architecture (compared to Dreamcast games which were optimized for the CLX2's tiled rendering architecture). The Neon 250 also lacks the CLX2's latency buffering and palettized texture support while VQ texture compression performance is halved, and it has bus contention due to having a single data bus (whereas the CLX2 has two data buses). However, the Neon 250 lacks many of the tiled rendering features of the CLX2: the tile size is halved (halving the fillrate), it lacks the CLX2's internal Z-buffering and alpha test capability with hardware front-to-back translucency sorting (further reducing the fillrate and performance, as well as requiring the Neon 250 to render a Z-buffer externally), and the tiling is partially handled by software (the CLX2 handles the tiling entirely in hardware). The Dreamcast's PowerVR CLX2 GPU was the basis for the PowerVR PMX1, a PC GPU released with the Neon 250 graphics card in 1999. While the Dreamcast is not as powerful as 1997–1999 Sega arcade hardware, including the Model 3 Step 2 (debuted 1997), NAOMI, and Hikaru, the Dreamcast surpassed the Model 3 Step 1 (debuted 1996) in performance.

Sega later packaged the Dreamcast into an arcade board as the Atomiswave.

The NAOMI was, in turn, the basis for two significantly more powerful arcade systems, the Hikaru (debuted 1999) and NAOMI 2 (debuted 2000). The NAOMI released for $1995, ten times the price of the Dreamcast and more expensive than a high-end PC at the time, but cheaper than the Sega Model 3 arcade system (which debuted at $20,000 in 1996). The Sega Dreamcast's arcade counterpart, the Sega NAOMI, has the same CPU, the Hitachi SH-4, at the same clock rate, but is more powerful in other ways, including an updated PowerVR2 GPU with faster performance, additional RAM and VRAM, higher bandwidth, and faster ROM cartridge storage.

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