[escimo]

I don't know how the software mentioned (Quake 3, Blender) are written in case of parallelism by using instruction set extension (e.g. VIS) and special purpose libs (e.g. Sun Performance Lib, OpenMP, ...). So it's hard to quantify in excuse with the user's experience/feeling, better by analyzing the program behavior at runtime (metrics) more precisely and/or take a look into the sources.

Until new arrival of competiting techs by Intel/AMD Sun systems were quite popular by running EDA, MCAD, pre-press, technical documentation, network and database applications with footprints much heavier as a x86 server was able to achieve at this time and with the same price point.

Also Sun was never a "real" competitor in the graphics area, even though Sun offered some innovative and reasonable graphic products for their customer base, e.g. VX/MVX, GX, GT, ZX (Leo), Elite3D, XVR-4000 for hardware, pixrect, XGL/XIL for software, compared to other vendor products (e.g. SGI Infinite Reality for HW, OpenGL for SW).

The idea to use a register file with reg windows the SPARC ISA wasn't bad at the time, if looking at the source code and runtime level for technical apps. But the realization was maybe not as good as it was intended to be (e.g. some regs are locked exclusive to the OS for calls/returns, #func args <6, win over/underflow handling) and easiest to understand. Once SPARC systems (hipe "RISC") performed better than any mk68030 or i386/486 (CISC). Sun tried to get better performance by implementing ILP into their CPUs using them as large SMP shared memory systems (SPARCserver 6x0MP -> sun4m), introduced multi-threading mechanisms by splitting heavy procs into smaller and mem-shared pieces and binding these to LWPs which were distributed by Solaris 2.x to all CPU's available. That followed by ... as well as all other vendors (SGI, HP, IBM and Intel/AMD running on MSW, GNU/Linux) did. And the story is still going on.