Comment by pixelpoet | Hacker News Reader

Comment by pixelpoet | Hacker News Reader

So much I'd like to write about demoscene, even though I didn't have the privilege of first-hand exposure... Studying it from afar in South Africa, it was clearly one of the strongest programming forces in the 90s.

In those days, the centre of the demoscene was Finland, with its Assembly demoparty and associated acts of unparalleled programming power (e.g. Future Crew). Those Future Crew and CNCD guys later were associated with a lot of rendering tech, both on CPU (Umbra visibility middleware, which ships with many/most modern games) and GPU (anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU hype?); their demoscene efforts morphed into the benchmarking software company Future Mark (with demoscene parody as "Maturefurk") as well as gamedev (Remedy entertainment).

These days, Nvidia created a R&D lab in Finland just for them, and is a great research effort led by Jaakko Lehtinen[1] (responsible much for the recent GAN stuff that went viral), Timo Aila, Samuli Laine and Tero Karras (responsible for the tech behind Nvidia's RTX [2], [3]).

[1] https://research.nvidia.com/person/jaakko-lehtinen

[2] https://research.nvidia.com/publication/understanding-effici...

[3] https://research.nvidia.com/sites/default/files/publications...

> anyone remember the infamous BitBoys GPU hype?

Shrug, probably the same guys who were behind the original Adreno. That obscure GPU architecture running on hundreds of millions (or billion+?) phones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adreno

https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/medfield-krait-smartpho...

Don't forget Falanx from Norway. They were acquired by ARM, turning into the Mali GPU.

The original Adreno GPU was a blend of Qualcomm's never-productized QShader architecture and AMD's handheld GPU, which was based on the original XBox GPU. The programmable shader core came from Qualcomm and the fixed function blocks came from AMD.

The Bitboys folks were terrific, both software and hardware, but they were not the only people working on this, or even the majority IIRC. I mis dearly working with them.

Eventually, this combination of former Bitboys, AMD and Qualcomm folks, working from different sites around the world and with vast cultural differences resulted in a lot of internal politics and we lost many great people.

Source: was there, did that.

Thanks for sharing, I had no idea! It'd be really interesting to hear more about that era.

"These days, Nvidia created a R&D lab in Finland just for them"

No. NVIDIA purchased Hybrid Graphics in 2006. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hybrid_Graphics

Funny, I thought the center was Sweden. But we generally dismiss what our eastern siblings are doing until forced to recognize them. :-)

I think it's safest to say Europe was the center of the demoscene. Each country had some absolutely fantastic coders, artists and musicians, but if you wanted to narrow it down I'd say the Scandinavian countries were probably over-represented in terms of skill level.

Just another example, IO Interactive in Denmark, famous for Hitman, also have deep roots in the local demo scene.

Also, Funcom in Norway.

Anyway, https://chipflip.wordpress.com/2015/06/12/famous-people-who-...

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