I don't recall why I picked the FireGL versus the Quadro, I think the drivers looked better in 2001. I do recall we paid $2K for it which seemed like a lot at the time, but my personal annual budget for gfx cards is still $2K.

Even before that, I had this insane software OpenGL called MetroX which was a full replacement for XFree86 that had native OpenGL support, allowing me to port a molecular graphics package (MidasPlus) to Linux (at the time, the authors used expensive SGIs and Alpha workstations). Later, Mesa replaced MetroX and was fast enough to do routine modelling for smaller systems, and eventually, with nvida T&L we could finally do decent large scale modelling (although the program used lines, which typically were not well-accelerated on the lower end cards that I could afford). At that point, the group I worked with looked at my machine (a linux box with a consumer grade GPU) and looked at their SGIs (including the abysmal SGI Visual Workstation running NT) and Alphas and saw the writing on the wall and eventually switched to Linux as their primary platform.

It really was a perfect example of "first they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win" for me.