[2] Their Reality Lab product was a 3D library written specifically for gaming purposes, aimed primarily at the "low end" market.
[3][4][5] Through the mid-90s SGI had been working on a series of efforts to provide a higher level API on top of OpenGL to make programming easier.
This would not only hide the implementation details and make the OpenGL/DirectX war superfluous, but at the same time offer considerably better high-level interfaces for a more robust object oriented development environment.
Although SGI committed resources to the project in order to provide a sample implementation, it appears they were unhappy with progress overall and complained "There's been lots of work, but relatively little communication.
Microsoft would provide a new low-level rendering engine for Windows known as Fahrenheit Low Level, essentially a replacement for the Reality Lab-based version of Direct3D.
Their MIPS-based workstations were quickly losing the performance lead they had in the early 1990s, and the company was in serious trouble as the average PC slowly but surely encroached on the high-end graphics market.
SGI saw Fahrenheit as an exit strategy; once complete they would be able to move to a PC-based lineup while still offering the best development tools for a now universal API.
[10] By 1999 it was clear that Microsoft had no intention of delivering Low Level; although officially working on it, almost no resources were dedicated to actually producing code.
Developers could write new functions for quickly traversing their known methods of storing data inside XSG, and then chain them into existing rendering paths.