The ones that were impressive were the ones that might have been $20k+.

At the time the Voodoo came out the run of the mill SGI workstations did not come with any of the advanced 3D graphics capabilites. Certainly nothing that blew you away. They did stuff like wireframe or unshaded 3D CAD and stuff like that, they had working OpenGL well before a PC did.

But the stuff that blew you away was stuff like the Onyx. Those blew me away when I saw them in the mid 1990s when SGI came to recruit where I went to school. They were $100k+ a year or two before the Voodoo came out.

There were other things they did that was way ahead of their time. I had an Indy for my workstation in 1996 at an internship. It had a webcam that could shoot stills or videos and do some basic video chat. In 1996. People used to fill up the hard drives with video cause hard drives were still so small. Irix had a really nice X Windows UI in the mid 1990s when Linux and the other commercial Unix variants had terrible UIs.

Speed-wise, 3dfx decimated all but the high-end boards at the time. GLiNT and Intergraphs low-end ards were still $3000-$5000 Those were 'real, workstation-level cards' with accurate rendering and all the OpenGL features. On the highest end were the Intergraph realizm cards which were 2X the price. Then you had the SGI systems that started out at 2x times the price of a loaded Integraph Workstation...