I did a stint as a co-op for SGI back in the late 90s. What was clear at the time was that there was a flight of the smart people out to the early PC graphics card industry causing serious brain drain in the company. This was also the time the company was making astoundingly overpriced PCs that made the bad bet on RAMBUS.
The reality is the company suffered from the same fundamental market forces that killed off most of the Workstation market in the 90s. No niche company could spend what Intel was spending on R&D every year so their performance advantage was continually eroding, while the price points for the hardware were not. Trying to transition to being a PC manufacturer wasn't totally crazy, but it would mean competing a highly price competitive market which SGI was absolutely not equipped to do.
I had the impression that the smart people in the graphics department saw that management was never going to go along with their "lets build far cheaper and better versions of our existing products on a PCI card that you can stuff in a cheap off the shelf PC" that would massively undercut the core business. So they quit the company and started nVidia.
Even Intel flirted with RAMBUS and paid for it. When I was at Pandemic Studios in 99-02, we'd get lots of prototype hardware from Intel and they sent us PIII's with the RAMBUS-exclusive i820 chipset. The things were impossible to get working stably and the RDRAM was ludicrously expensive. Total dead end from the get-go, and slower than AMD's stuff.
Intel was really on a dumb path starting in the late 90s, with RAMBUS, Itanium, the P4 debacle, and missing the emerging mobile market, and didn't right themselves until 2006 with the Core series. But they were big enough to be able to make a few mistakes unlike SGI.
Yeah the Battlefront games were awesome! They were a bit after my time but built on the foundations of multi-vehicle combat that we worked on in Battlezone II, just supercharged with more open world capabilities and obviously fantastic IP with Star Wars.
Originally we were just x86 PC games but started working on console stuff in mid-2000. I got a chance to head up design on a PS2 game with Sony, and we had one or two other 'keep the company alive' projects as well before having the breakout hits of Full Spectrum Warrior and Battlefront. By then I was well off to college though.
> there was a flight of the smart people out to the early PC graphics card industry causing serious brain drain in the company
Yeah, I can imagine you could count on the fingers of your hands, the number of people could, back then, design 3D acceleration hardware, so it must have been a pretty exclusive club in the Bay Area at the time where everyone in this field knew each other, I can only assume.
The reality is the company suffered from the same fundamental market forces that killed off most of the Workstation market in the 90s. No niche company could spend what Intel was spending on R&D every year so their performance advantage was continually eroding, while the price points for the hardware were not. Trying to transition to being a PC manufacturer wasn't totally crazy, but it would mean competing a highly price competitive market which SGI was absolutely not equipped to do.
I had the impression that the smart people in the graphics department saw that management was never going to go along with their "lets build far cheaper and better versions of our existing products on a PCI card that you can stuff in a cheap off the shelf PC" that would massively undercut the core business. So they quit the company and started nVidia.