Having used SGIs in the 1990s they didn't have any power at all until you spent many many many thousands of dollars.
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.
