There were many semi-affordable graphics cards in the late 1990s. At various times I had cards from Matrox, Dynamic Pictures, and a Fujitsu prototype. These were all "pro" cards, and those products were wiped out when gamer cards came along and made GPUs a mass market product. So was SGI, of course.
"The list price for the (Dynamic Pictures) Oxygen 102 was $1495 in 1996, later reduced to $399."
I still have my Oxygen 402 [1] that I learned 3d modeling on, you needed these pro cards to work in OpenGL apps like Softimage. It went for $5k in early 97 but by mid 98 it had fallen to ~$750 when I got mine. The 90s were wild for how fast hardware went obsolete.
"The list price for the (Dynamic Pictures) Oxygen 102 was $1495 in 1996, later reduced to $399."