One feature offsetting the Charisma engine from the rest of the bunch is that it possesses 3 texture units per rendering pipeline.
Most graphics processors can apply one or two textures to any given pixel per clock cycle.
More advanced GPUs have more than one pipeline, for example, the GeForce has four pipelines receiving input from texture units each. The Radeon Charisma engine has two pipelines with fed by three texture units each. In other words, it is capable of applying up to three textures in a single pass. Most current games are not capable of taking advantage of this feature yet, similarly most video benchmarks are optimized for multiples of 2 textures. This is something that needs to be considered when looking at e.g. 3D Mark2000 which uses four textures for the fill rate test.