The RV100 chip used in the radeon 7000 is from 2001.
another strange thing is that only with the last and dx9 optimized omaga-driver the techdemo radeons ark looks fine,
with all other tested drivers I got more or less glitches. Mostly on giant reflecting areas.
btw. it absolutly stunning that the radeon 7000 can display that quality and effects without having a fully featured pixel shader pipeline.
it has only one pipeline at all that does not have the features to get a even pixelshader 1.0 requirements, but it is flexible so that the ati-guys could make it happen, that the radeons-ark techdemo could look like a high-end pixelshader-demo.
it's much better in quality then the matrox-g400-techdemo which also has some "reflecting water effects" without having pixelshader-functionality and any kind of shaders.
The radeons-ark demo is a real stunner for such a low-end card like the R7000. To me there is no other techdemo, game or even a demoscene-production kown that uses the pipeline in such a way the radeon-ark demos does.
http://www.pouet.net/topic.php?which=1292&page=4#c549377
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Retro-Gamer 😀 ...on different machines