carls wrote:
@orgamsatron
My CPU is an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ which I think should be enough for most demos.
I don't think you get my point, though. To me, demos are supposed to look awesome even on slower hardware - compare for example The Castle, Little Nell or Relic running on AGA and a 50MHz 060 and a demo that requires a 2.2GHz P4 and a GF4 Ti4200. Of course the PC demo should be fast! Where did optimization go?
Well, it really is a different planet now. In the '80s-'90s, hardware didn't scale - demoing was a show of skill. Today, hardware scales on a weekly basis, and it's... let's say, equally important... to show you can conceive of *anything* that puts it to use. The commodity software scene certainly isn't doing the job (because, let's face it, you can't make *money* off something that only runs on the cutting 0.1% of the PC scene!)...
That said, I haven't really looked, lately. I was amused to find something from MFX? (mfx_d2.tgz, forget if I found it on Scene.org?) for Linux that ran under SDL and FreeBSD's Linuxulation... that whet my appetite, and I went looking for other Linux demos that actually looked like "demos," but seems the few groups who've released have done a poor job of explaining what, exactly, their software requires (and thus is 'doing').
Obviously, to have a 'scene' as open as that some people knew (I was never really around for it), you can't be restricting to rare and expensive hardware... but I think there's room enough for both approaches to have their place.
