Re: A different yet similar question...

[slevy]

It might possibly become bearable to adjust the view if you turn off most of
the display while it moves.  For example, you could type "af" in the graphics
window to turn off face drawing, then rotate using only the bounding box as 
a guide, then "af" again to view.  Or if displaying a wire frame is fast enough,
typing "afae" would toggle faces off/edges on.

Another option: can you produce a simplified version of the object?
Not sure how well this would work, but you might e.g. randomly select
every Nth face of an OFF object, producing a new object.  Load both the
complete object and the sampled one into geomview, turning normalization off. 
Select the complete version and turn off face drawing.  Use "orbit" mode to
move the camera around (you could rotate the world instead, but with orbit
mode you can simply leave the complete-version selected).  Toggle face drawing
on the complete version when the time seems ripe.

As for SGI vs. Sun: yes, you'll find graphics on almost any Iris to be
substantially faster.  Here are some benchmarks; I've selected just the Sun
and Iris times, omitting other systems.  Note times are milliseconds, so
larger numbers are slower.  Even a Sparc-10 Sun rates among the slower Irises.

# Tests: "polygon" : 1620 small flat-shaded LIGHTED polygons
# 	 "matrix"  : 30 vectors x 115 matrices
#	 "tmesh"   : flat-shaded LIGHTED tmesh sphere: 35 rows of 70 tri's
#			(Uses tmesh primitive on SGI; other platforms just
#			 draw 35x35 quadrilateral mesh)
# All tests in 200x200 window; all polygons are flat-shaded and LIGHTED.
# Times are milliseconds per test cycle.

	       polygon	matrix tmesh
Sun: X Geomview	1250	 1250   980	godel (Sparc IPC GX, X11R5 server)
Pers Iris 25G	 400	  900	400	bolyai (Personal Iris 4D/25G)
Indy 8bit PCach	 275	  500	260	48MB Indy,8bit,primary cache only
Sparc-10, X11R5	 257	  280	205	Sparcstation 10, X11R5 server
R3000 Basic	 175	  310	130	ricci(R3K Indigo/basic graphics)
Pers Iris 30G	 240	  163	228	euclid  (Pers Iris 4D/30G)
Pers Iris 20GT	 116	  360	119	nielsen (Pers Iris 4D/20GT)
R3000 XS24	 137	   99	 84	weyl    (R3000 Indigo XS24Z)
Indigo-2 XZ	  76	   59	 45	abel    (Indigo-2 XZ)
R4000 XZ	  69	   60	 42	banach  (R4000 Indigo XZ)
R4000 Elan	  43	   89		lebesgue.msri.org  (R4000 Elan)
Indigo-2 Extreme  24	   52	 15	nonabel (Indigo-2 Extreme)
Crimson VGX	  25	   61	 12	gauss   (Crimson VGX)

   - Stuart