"A ship in the harbor is safe, but that is not what ships are built for."
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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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AndrewL
Friday, January 7, 2011

Lol @ people in the comments telling Humus what's important in graphics

Yeah this demo is just... weak. Nothing really impressive about it at all. Too bad because IMHO the Toy Shop demo is still the best IHV demo to date, including all of the NVIDIA ones. Been going downhill since then unfortunately

ThorSevan
Thursday, February 3, 2011

Hey Humus!! Long time no talk!

I�m very happy to see that you are doing well and that you got married, congratulations!
Nice pictures that you got there.

Yeah, I am a bit surprised by this new ATI/AMD demo� I just looked at the screenshots and I must say that I�m bummed at the lack of polish and overall design� That water... The particles... It just looks like some weird crappy game I used to play at lan parties when I was a kid�

In my mind, ATI used to have the best demos lately with Ruby. They showed that ATI had a solid team behind these demos composed of engineers, artists and designers with the objective to showcase only the best techniques and results that can be acheived with the latest graphic hardware. It seams things have changed lately�

I also wanted to tell you that your work at ATI, mostly referring to the SDK�s, has helped me tremendously over the years and I�m saddened to see the lack of continuity at AMD developer relations. I can't even get them to answer me anymore at my new company! The minute you left I noticed that they had stopped supporting and releasing SDK�s using that framework of yours. Now I can�t find anything useful in there� We�re on our own! :P

I wish you luck on your current and next projects and a wonderful life ahead of you!

Looking forward chatting more with you one of these days!

Cheers,
ThorSevan

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