Ah - SGI. Their burned bright and burned out rather quickly. I heard that buying MIPS was probably a mistake.
I do remember seeing a documentary on Pixar back in the day. They were still based in Point Richmond, California (near the Chevron Richmond Refinery) and they showed the racks of Sun workstations that they were using to render digital animation.
81-2009 I think.
SGI's weren't super great 3D platforms for movie creation.
Pixar ran all kinds of pizza box server based stuff Alias/Maya, Softimage.
For a while these vendors ran on suns, but off the shelf boxes running cot GPU's were a better value proposition and ran away with 3d creation.
Where the SGI's excelled was being able to composite 3d models onto 2D images and being a " hero box" finishing up complex commercials and spots. Simply having a video I/O was a big deal, the fact that they were able to work in pretty much any resolution made them work for TV and Film pulling away from dedicated platforms like the Quantel Henry and Harry, or the magnificent Grass Valley Groups Kaleidoscope Kadenza suite and this let us sell to multiple markets and our clients take on any work that walked through the door.
From 95-when I left in 2011, myself and my teams sold over a billion dollars of software and hardware products.
Baluzzo tanked SGI and they made a series of really bad decisions.
MIPS were faster than their faceplates implied, but the SGI's really shone in the Graphics engine and their ability to scale speed and texture ram, and their incredible bus bandwidth that could keep everything connected without what states making the box really fluid under the pen.
Cray brought nothing to media, and apparently little to the rest of SGI.