I honestly don'tt know what you're talking about- I wrote many programs that did high performance texture mapping on SGIs and they had both texturing capability and RAM. When you say "SGI card", it makes me sound like you're talkijng about something other than an Octane2 or InfiniteReality.
The Indy/Indigo2 graphics - the Elan/Extreme/XZ - never had texture hardware, but would fall back to software. It wasn't until the High IMPACT series was released for Indigo2 in 1995 they had hardware texture mapping on their "low end" - i.e. desktop sized systems.
1995 is when I started using SGIs in earnest (on Indigo2 and RealityEngine). I do recall a lab next to ours that had $15K indys that were absolutely useful for doing anything with graphics.
