The sgi stuff was also engineering focused. The net result was it was not really that fast, powerful sure, but my understanding is the early consumer cards(voodoo) could run rings around them. The game cards did not have the z-buffer depth, fill rate, 3d texture support, line drawing, that sgi's had(cad features), but they could keep the frame rates high and had more features that made the games look pretty.
replyMy personal favorite sgi from the mid 90's was the o2. It had a unified memory model so it was the slow red headed step child of the sgi ecosystem. But because of that unified memory you could effectively pack it with close to a gigabyte of texture memory, whatever the OS and app did not need. This was an obscene amount in 1996. For comparison the top of the line sgi desktop system at the time had 8 mb of texture memory. It does not hurt that the o2 was probably the best designed and engineered computer I have ever seen.
