A Moogle  🏳️‍🌈 💻 🎮 🎶 🇸🇪

Serious SGI talk: As far as case design goes, they're amazing. As far as 3D performance goes, it depends heavily on what the system is fitted with. An R4k Indigo with Light graphics or an Indy with Newport will blow the doors off a contemporary PC on CPU loads, sure.

Even so, graphics-wise, the Light and Newport boards weren't much better than contemporary PC SVGA cards that had integrated BitBLT functionality. The majority of 3D rendering was CPU-driven in those cases.

Depth buffering was faked on XL/Newport boards on the Indy by loading a 32-bit pixel mask register, meaning any 3D geometry had to be drawn in horizontal 32-pixel spans, max. That's all you got unless you were using painter's algorithm and ate the overdraw cost.

Things weren't all sunshine and roses even with the XZ board on the Indy that provided accelerated 3D. Anecdotally, a top-end R5000 CPU module was better off with a 24-bit XL board, since the CPU could transform and light geometry faster than the XZ board itself.

The Indigo 2 and Octane had similar rough aspects, graphically: The boilerplate SI/SE and SSI/SSE lacked hardware-accelerated texturing. On the I2, only the High IMPACT and Maximum IMPACT boards have hardware-accelerated texturing.