A better point is that the consumer 3d cards were created specifically because SGI was designing 3d machines the wrong way. It became obvious that the way to design a consumer 3d card was to create a small multithreaded chip that you could scale up and down based on the workload. SGI instead created special designs for every computer, sometimes multiple graphics board designs for every computer.

Sometimes (such as VICE in an O2) SGI would also put old processors in odd configurations inside new computers in the hopes they could offload things such as dvd decompression, but then drop dvd support before releasing the machine while keeping the hardware.

SGI was just very unfocused around 1998-2204 when this whole consumer 3d chip became realistic and they just refused to do things in a sane way. they even knew it but did it anyway. Betting the company on web servers instead.