It's not because of NVIDIA but because of Moore. We have SGI-level five-dollar microcontroller boards now.

https://wiki.preterhuman.net/SGI_Maximum_IMPACT says:

> Maximum Impact graphics are the highest tier of SGI's IMPACT graphics offered both on the SGI Indigo2 and SGI Octane workstations. They include a 27MB frame buffer and have 2 raster engines (i.e. are "2RSS" boards).

...

> Two GE11 Geometry/Image Engines:

>> Power the graphics subsystem

>>> 960 MFLOPS for transforming triangles

>>> 960 MIOPS for processing pixels

>>> 600,000 gates each

>>> Note: The refreshed Octane 'E-series' Geometry engines were capable of 1344 MFLOPS

>> Two RE4 Raster Engines:

>>> Provide the pixel-fill capabilities

>>> 234 Mpixels/sec gouraud fill rate

I think the Raspberry Pi 4B has 8000 megaflops https://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/comments/fsc3fw/perfor... and I think that's just the CPU. That's roughly 5× the performance of the Indigo²'s Maximum Impact card. The Pi 3 CPU came in at 2700 megaflops: https://raspberrypi.stackexchange.com/questions/55862/what-i... and I think the GPU is something like four times that.

Of course, benchmarks can be misleading, but if anything I'd expect this number to understate the difference, since the SGI card was a fixed-function pipeline. You can do all kinds of crazy visual effects on the Pi's CPU that the Indigo² couldn't touch. And of course the Pi's texture memory and framebuffer is measured in gigabytes now, not megabytes.

Compare the specs on the ESP32-S3 IoT microcontroller: 480 megaflops (counting multiply-accumulates as two flops, as is stupid but traditional) https://www.reddit.com/r/esp32/comments/t46960/whats_the_esp.... It only comes with 320K of RAM, but if you want a 27MB framebuffer, it supports 32MiB external RAM (PSRAM): https://docs.espressif.com/projects/esp-idf/en/stable/esp32s... but that's still less than half as fast as the Indigo²'s Maximum Impact card. They cost US$2.74 though https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/espressif-systems... so you might be able to afford more than one. They're commonly used for things like opening cat flaps in doors so your cat can go outside: https://hackaday.com/2025/06/12/2025-pet-hacks-contest-cat-a...

But this web page is about SGIs that long predate the Indigo² (which was circa 01994), such as the 4D/60 from 01987 built around an 8MHz MIPS R2000, and so are dramatically slower than the ESP32. The "G" card described could fill 5500 Gouraud-shaded polygons per second, while the "GTX" could hit 100,000, about 2,000 per frame.

Max Impact was the first workstation I used that delivered solid model rotation at 60Fps. I remember literally feeling that smooth movement and how it made a significant difference in assembly and some interactive surfacing / sketching workflows.

The O2 Copper unified or shared memory design was the first machine I used that could deliver large image and or video manipulation via surfaces. Was amazing to see a huge satellite image and be able to zoom way in, composite other images to sub-pixel accuracy, or model a product featuring high resolution reflections at 60fps.

At the time, PC cards just did not yet offer GB of RAM, but would soon.

The O2 chipset got used in the 320, 540 visual workstations too. The shared memory performed great on some texture memory demanding games, but all the cool features went largely unused. There was going to be Linux X Window support, essentially creating an Intel O2 type computer that could be fast, dual CPU, and big memory capable, but Microsoft cried about it and basically flexed their ownership of the ARC loader SGI used on those distinctive PC's and it all got buried. Not even a leak...

Years later, Apple improved on those concepts with the M1, which feels remarkably like what could have been earlier, ar least graphically.

I agree a Pi4 feels 90's era workstation like. Faster, but not so fast that the feel of that era is gone.

My core memory of SGI workstations was not that they necessarily were super fast when it came to pure flops (especially towards the end of their life), but how smooth and solid they were. Even if our Nvidia/Wintel machines were faster on paper and faster at things like rendering, the SGI machines would run buttery smooth no matter what we threw at them. Whether scrubbing through complex composition shots, doing real time lighting preview, or manipulating large 3D models, the frame rate and latency on the SGI machines was rock solid.