I was doing 3d graphics. We had broadcast television on analog at the time with engineers that did not know how to use computers running the show. The cost of an O2 SGI workstation was £10k or so - you could buy a broadcast spec clock for that sort of money. Digital tape machines - Digibeta - cost £40k, plus you would always need more than one.<p>That whole industry went race to the bottom. Internally you also had people not willing to learn the new PC tools. So there was a while before the PC inertia got going.
On SGI machines doing CPU locked tasks, e.g. frame rendering from a render queue there was a simple cost equation with using PCs, off the shelf non SCSI disks were another saving, as was RAM, a tenth the price on the PC. Memory for SGI machines would need board level authorisation!<p>So with many SGI use cases the CPUs would be doing very little. The graphics pipeline would be doing all the real work and you would hit your polygon limit in there. Only if you went CPU intensive - software rendering - would you Max out the CPU.<p>Most SGI use cases were in capital intensive industries where proper money was paid for proper professional kit. Those 6K£ D1 monitors? Yes you could have a wall of TVs instead but that would not happen. So white box PCs took a while.