A little bit of nostalgia with this video related to the Silicon Graphics SGI Onyx RE2.


(courtesy Motherboard)

I remember using it for research work and it was certainly plenty of graphics rendering power. Something that other Silicon Graphics workstations such as Indy could not meet. Graphics were using either the OpenGL or OpenInventor library. If I remember well, OpenGL was closer to the metal, and OpenInventor had a few abstractions for making it easier to solve the problems you were trying to solve.

None of these supported ray tracing, let alone radiosity algorithms.