My memory of early 2000s is different. Commercial games gave up on software rendering with PS2, ubiquitous 3D cards on PC and Microsoft paying everyone who agre

My memory of early 2000s is different. Commercial games gave up on software rendering with PS2, ubiquitous 3D cards on PC and Microsoft paying everyone who agreed to develop for the Xbox. Graphics programming in games then was not much different than now. It was about giving good tools to artists and designers and not about doing "cool fx". Though I cannot speak for the whole industry, obviously, just what I've experienced. > it was also a dumb choice for a name Blame Steve Jobs and his Renderman :) At the time consumer GPUs with shaders came out it's been long established term for any code processing graphics data during rendering. >Either way, at some point (late 200X's?) professional game industry blew past the demoscene in production level. It did happen. I always thought it was the Hollywood movie level budgets (because those exploded too, in that era, didn't they?), but there might have been other factors. I remember in mid 90s some demo-groups claimed to work on actual games ("Into the shadows" guys said it's a prototype for the game they had been writing) and even on hardware (Pyramid3D lol) but I don't think anything noticeable came out. Remedy Entertainment is, probably, the most successful exit from the demoscene and it never set the bar for the AAA industry. The difference between demos and games is the difference between dancing and fighting. You move your body in both cases but with dancing you are fine as long as you pull some cool moves, while in fighting you actually need to survive and harm your opponent as much as possible. Same as in games you need to draw what the artists want and in demos you can draw anything as long as it's cool. There was never a sensible competition between the two. I imagine game programmers suck at making demos just as much as democoders suck at making games :)