Sometime by the mid 90s SGI figured it had everyone by the balls with their hardweare-3d editing software/effects stack and basically stopped innovating. Unfortunately it was about the time Softimage became available for NT, PC based OpenGL accelerators and dual Pentium-pros became available. You could buy an Intergraph NT workstation several times cheaper than a SGI. That was the first call and SGI missed it. The from 1996 even cheaper 3D game accelerators appeared, at first they were nothing more than texturing toys but quickly improved and by 2000 rivaled and exceeded SGI solutions in OpenGL performance. The last workstation class graphics from SGI, the V6-V12 cards were behind gaming cards from GeForce in performance and functionality and basically obsolete on release.