"When you seek revenge, dig two graves."
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What happened to the AMD demo team?
Tuesday, December 21, 2010 | Permalink

So I downloaded and tried the Mecha HK-2207 demo. I don't know what has happened to the AMD demo team. They used to beat the hell out of anything Nvidia could produce back in the Ruby days. Then production value went down slowly, but even the demos for the 5800 series at least looked pretty good. But this demo leaves me very disappointed.

The demo is 665MB compressed (900MB on disk), is less than a minute long, and it just plainly looks old. It's like DX7 with some posteffects on top of it. The posteffects are fine I suppose, but it cannot save the seriously lacking underlying tech and artwork. It's just polishing the turd. I hear some people say that maybe little focus was on the graphics because this demo is for showing off GPU physics, but I'm not seeing that either. I mean seriously, where are the physics effects? I looked for it, but saw nothing I could tell apart from plain animation.

For a while I suspected it's because I'm running it on a 5870 and not the new 6970, but then looking at the published screenshots it's the same there. I mean, look at that water, is that a demonstration of EMBM in DX6? At this quality level I'm surprised it was released at all. It's almost demarketing.

I want Ruby back!

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blah
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I'd beg to differ. Back in the days when NVIDIA did stunning fairies and mermaids, ATI did... a shiny racecar on a floor.

Reavenk
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

Yea, I looked at the screenshots and I had a feeling it was going to be retro-ish, at that point I decided to not even lookup youtube videos of it.

Axel
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I think this one was produced by Trinigy (it uses their engine).

cbloom
Tuesday, December 21, 2010

I think most of the ATI demo team works at Valve now.

Tom
Wednesday, December 22, 2010

Looks like one of the original Unreal Tournament levels

Viktor
Wednesday, December 22, 2010

This is ridiculous, probably AMD want to kill themselves.

MrCoder
Wednesday, December 22, 2010

That water is a joke, right? And no motion blur what so ever?

hornet
Wednesday, December 22, 2010

I agree on this demo being a new low, but AMD never put as much effort into demos as NVIDIA (though the snowboarding ruby-particles were pretty awesome!)

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