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.