By Jim Rossignol on September 30th, 2009 at 9:13 pm.
I’m going to have to fall for the viral marketing tricks on this occasion and link to ATI’s science fiction website for the XFX graphics range of 2118AD (which is a rather unsubtle teaser site for the Radeon HD 5000 cards), because it’s a little bit bonkers. The spoof corporate videos poke fun at common futurist themes, such as the blurring of the reality-virtuality distinction, and the silly science of post-human augmentation, with not-quite-funny-but-what-why-did-they-do-that results. It’s just a shame that my crappy 2009 internet is having such trouble streaming videos from the future…
30/09/2009 at 21:20 TeeJay says:
I lolled
30/09/2009 at 21:21 Po0py says:
?
30/09/2009 at 21:21 MrBejeebus says:
great tag there!
and the videos seem to be reaaally laggy for me, maybe i shouldnt buy an xfx card!?
30/09/2009 at 21:31 blahhh says:
LOL @ tag!
30/09/2009 at 21:46 a says:
The searing pain of real explosions or making out with a red-headed robot. Either way, the future looks quite depressing.
30/09/2009 at 21:47 Andersen Peters says:
Silly science?
30/09/2009 at 21:49 linfosoma says:
My god this is so good, I want a card that supports DX67 like right now.
30/09/2009 at 21:51 Larington says:
In the future, websites will still struggle to load quickly…
30/09/2009 at 22:00 Eplekongen says:
turns out, videos from the future doesn’t work as well as youtube does.
30/09/2009 at 22:06 Pali says:
I honestly don’t think they spent a great deal on it, at least I’d hope they didn’t. Still it’s a pretty amusing/interesting advertising campaign.
30/09/2009 at 22:10 duel says:
those videos went pretty weird at some points, i forget what they are trying to sell…
30/09/2009 at 22:28 El Stevo says:
Too juddery. Didn’t watch.
30/09/2009 at 22:37 Marshall says:
We just don’t have the technology handle their sophisticated futuristic compression formats.
30/09/2009 at 22:37 Pags says:
*Play video*
“Eh eh eh ex eh eh ef eh eh eh ex…”
*Close video*
In the future, everyone lags.
30/09/2009 at 22:57 Serph says:
Guys, it’s obviously laggy because of the time distortion field on the website. How else could it have been beamed from the future!?
30/09/2009 at 22:59 Nova says:
Strange he doesn’t load anymore but the videos are laggy like hell. A bit embarassing for ATi.
30/09/2009 at 23:06 Monkeybreadman says:
The phrase, ‘so much good work is lost for the lack of a little more’ springs to mind.
30/09/2009 at 23:07 Monkeybreadman says:
Oh and a bit off topic but when will i have 6 monitors? Give me physics man, i want physics, PHYSICS!
30/09/2009 at 23:06 army of none says:
The tag is the best part of this post.
30/09/2009 at 23:29 Tei says:
Is depresing that OpenGL is still second to DirectX in 2118 :-/
30/09/2009 at 23:53 Rath says:
I’m still going with nVidia for my next card. I’ve had Radeon cards for so long I just feel it’s time for a change.
On an extremely tangential note, Kieron Gillen either has a clone or is moonlighting by resurfacing the ice during Cardiff Devils games.
01/10/2009 at 00:18 diziet says:
Wot no Better Than Life references?
01/10/2009 at 00:26 A Delicate Balance says:
“XFX Graphics: We make reality delicious!”
I’ve always wanted something that can do that. Reality is not realistic enough. Or delicious enough.
When is this going to be released. I bet this turns out to be another Duke Nukem’ Forever. Damnit, I will so be dead by the time reality becomes real enough to be possible to represent in computer game form. How frustratingly unrealistic.
01/10/2009 at 00:31 jungleFish says:
I don’t think this is an ATI campaign. I think XFX is a brand name that sells computer parts. I realized this when I was on their main site and it was giving me ads for NVIDIA products.
01/10/2009 at 02:24 Spoon says:
You are correct sir, XFX makes both Nvidia and ATI cards.
01/10/2009 at 00:51 Paul Moloney says:
It would be nice if they used all that money to hire some decent developers who can code drivers that don’t cause video freezes. I’m definitely going for an nVidia next time.
P.
01/10/2009 at 01:43 Deuteronomy says:
Video number three with that chick with a confused expression holding up a molecular model was quite amusing. Unless Nvidia gets its shit together I will be getting an HD5850 this christmas.
01/10/2009 at 01:54 Toto says:
Yeah, don’t get hopeful with Nvidia. Their drivers have been complete crap for a while. In fact, every driver since 182.xx has been crap (blue screens, stuttering, freezing, nv4disp crashes, etc..).
01/10/2009 at 02:02 jalf says:
Sure it’s not just your GPU that’s broken? ;)
01/10/2009 at 03:56 JKjoker says:
i havent experienced any crashes, but i do hate the (sort of ) “new” bloated control panel GUI for retards, i loved the old one, simple and to the point.
01/10/2009 at 02:22 Spoon says:
Video 1: “XFX graphics is here to make it realer.”
Could they not even find someone with decent grammar to write a script for them?
01/10/2009 at 02:50 fearian says:
Psst, Spoon! Don’t tell anyone, but I think it’s a joke!
That said, if you where joking yourself, give me the ol’ wink or a nudge.
01/10/2009 at 03:27 Spoon says:
Wink and/or nudge. It still bothered me every time they used the word though.
01/10/2009 at 08:29 Paul S says:
And it feels so real you can feel the feeling.
“But these cards go to DX11.”
01/10/2009 at 02:49 fearian says:
It didn’t lag for me and I tittered to myself pleasantly. I MUST BE FROM THE FUTURE.
Honestly I thought it was a pretty funny, low budget video that probably more about making ATI seem like a cool funny ‘with-the-web-trends’ company than directly selling graphics cards.
01/10/2009 at 04:20 Elyscape says:
The main thing being advertised here is actually ATI’s Eyefinity Technology, a breakthrough feature that allows you to utilize an unprecedented six displays for unparalleled immersion. [/advertisement]
Incidentally, it didn’t lag for me. Also, Eyefinity seems to be an evolved version of the Surround Gaming thing that was on the Matrox Parhelia forever ago.
01/10/2009 at 04:24 waffles says:
It didn’t lag for me, though i do have a XFX radeon card.
Also, this is a XFX campaign, not ATI.
01/10/2009 at 05:50 underproseductor says:
Didn’t lag for me, too. Maybe the server is somewhere in my town. Cuz normally even youtube videos lag for me.
01/10/2009 at 07:19 Flit says:
I love the black tape over the wii logo on the mario kart wheel.
01/10/2009 at 07:48 Srejv says:
Feels like one of the intro videos from Better Off Ted.
01/10/2009 at 09:05 Patton says:
Unless the ATI 5800 series offers a large boost in performance compared to my ATI 4870 1Gb, and i do mean LARGE, i wont be buying it. In this economic situation wasting 300-400 euros on a card thats not a great improvement doesnt make any sense.
01/10/2009 at 09:06 Lack_26 says:
I had no problems with the video, which was funny, the other two videos are good too.
I love that at the top it has;
Gaming Research, Bio-tech and Genetics, Military and Weapons, Aerospace.
Wait what? Well, it's good to see that in the future our brave soldiers will be fighting with ATI assault rifles and backed up by man-pad Nvidea hunter-killer missiles.
01/10/2009 at 09:26 Tei says:
I have a XFX card, and i have it permanently underclocked to the max to let it work decently. In vengence, I flag “spam” all mails I receive from then (I probably registered his product with a checkbox [x] you accept to receive information with new productos, but I choose to act irrational here).
01/10/2009 at 09:40 wahwah says:
They’re very similar to those Verdian Dynamics ads on Better Off Ted, which isn’t a bad thing.
01/10/2009 at 09:51 Stringycustard says:
@wahwah I was about to say the same thing. Veridian Dynamics is much better, though.
01/10/2009 at 09:59 Schmung says:
Man, I wanted to be the first person to make the Veridian Dynamics connection. That’s what I get for waiting ’till this morning to watch the vid. I guess time and the RPS comments thread waits for no man.
01/10/2009 at 10:52 Garg says:
Didn’t think that viral campaign was too great, but geeking out a bit and looking at ATI’s new cards and you can see that NVidia really need to pull the rabit out of the hat for their next gen cards. Ultimately this is great, the competition of the past year has really driven GPU prices down and this looks like it’s going to continue.
01/10/2009 at 11:32 Lilliput King says:
Dunno, Garg. Will probably be the way it is for a very long time. In GBP, you get a budget card for about £80-100, and a mid range for £180-200. It’s only top level cards that vary, and It’s really just a case of who offers a more powerful/stable/overclockable card at each price range that decides who is the current king of cards.
ATi is doing well at the moment but Nvidia’s 8800 range wasn’t so long ago, and was ludicrously popular at all price ranges. Tbh they both deliver fairly decent products, so they’ll probably keep duking it out at the same level of competition for years to come.
01/10/2009 at 11:56 Clovis says:
Hmm… I already prefer my gaming experience over real life! Apparently I too am from the future and am not just suffering from extreme depression. Hooray!
I’m outraged!
01/10/2009 at 17:27 Clovis says:
Er… why did my sig appear in this post? That looks idiotic. I wasn’t outraged at all (and no one around me suffered).
01/10/2009 at 15:05 bill says:
Unrelated, but:
Can you RPS guys contact ATI/NVIDIA and see if they can do anything about backwards compatibility of video drivers? With the recent resurgence of classic gaming, it’s becoming increasingly evident that modern cards can’t run old games.
There must be something they can do about it. With a little prodding…
01/10/2009 at 17:22 Tem says:
How about around 2x the performance? http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643
01/10/2009 at 17:24 Tem says:
Reply fail. But, here’s the link to the actual swf file if, like for me, you come up with a black page. http://www.xfxforce.com/2118ad/2118web5.swf
03/10/2009 at 01:59 Shadow Wulf says:
Odd cause the video doesn’t lag for me at all. In fact it ran beautifully for me.
16/09/2010 at 08:00 Free Bingo Games says:
This game is not good at all playing this game is such a waste of time damn!!!