Sega / Lockheed Martin · 1996 · 1996 – 1999
CPU: IBM/Motorola PowerPC 603e @ 66–166 MHz + 2× Lockheed Martin Real3D Pro-1000 GPU
Built in partnership with the defence contractor Lockheed Martin, the Model 3 was so far ahead of any home console that its games — Virtua Fighter 3, Scud Race, Daytona USA 2 — looked like they came from the next century.
The Sega Model 3 arrived in 1996 as the successor to the Model 2 that had defined the mid-1990s arcade, and it represented the absolute peak of Sega's coin-op ambition. It was produced in partnership with Lockheed Martin — the aerospace and defence giant — whose Real3D division supplied graphics technology derived from professional military simulation, the same lineage that had informed the Model 2. The result was a board that outstripped every home console on the market by a margin that was almost absurd. The hardware was formidable. An IBM-Motorola PowerPC 603e served as the main CPU, running at 66, 100, or 166 MHz depending on the board revision, supported by 33 MB of RAM — an enormous quantity for 1996 — and, critically, two Lockheed Martin Real3D Pro-1000 graphics processors, working alongside Mitsubishi 3D-RAM ALU chips. The board existed in successive revisions: Step 1.0 and Step 1.5 in 1996, Step 2.0 in 1997, and Step 2.1 in 1998, each incrementally improving performance. What that silicon delivered was a catalogue of graphical techniques that home hardware would not achieve for years. The Model 3 was designed to push as many textured polygons as possible in real time, and it supported multisample anti-aliasing, motion blur, specular highlighting, reflection and advanced shading, multiple simultaneous light sources, and even facial animation — features that sound unremarkable now and were close to science fiction at the time. Virtua Fighter 3 (1996) was the first game to run on the board, and it stunned players with fighters rendered at a level of detail and fluidity nothing else approached; Scud Race followed as the first Model 3 racer, and Daytona USA 2, Sega Rally 2, and Star Wars Trilogy Arcade filled out a library of extraordinary technical showpieces. The Model 3 marks the last moment when the arcade held a decisive, unarguable technological advantage over the living room — within a few years the Dreamcast-derived NAOMI would deliberately close that gap, and the arcade's central justification would quietly disappear.