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…


I lolled
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?
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great tag there!
and the videos seem to be reaaally laggy for me, maybe i shouldnt buy an xfx card!?
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LOL @ tag!
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The searing pain of real explosions or making out with a red-headed robot. Either way, the future looks quite depressing.
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Silly science?
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My god this is so good, I want a card that supports DX67 like right now.
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In the future, websites will still struggle to load quickly…
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turns out, videos from the future doesn’t work as well as youtube does.
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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.
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those videos went pretty weird at some points, i forget what they are trying to sell…
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Too juddery. Didn’t watch.
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We just don’t have the technology handle their sophisticated futuristic compression formats.
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*Play video*
“Eh eh eh ex eh eh ef eh eh eh ex…”
*Close video*
In the future, everyone lags.
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Guys, it’s obviously laggy because of the time distortion field on the website. How else could it have been beamed from the future!?
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Strange he doesn’t load anymore but the videos are laggy like hell. A bit embarassing for ATi.
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The phrase, ‘so much good work is lost for the lack of a little more’ springs to mind.
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Oh and a bit off topic but when will i have 6 monitors? Give me physics man, i want physics, PHYSICS!
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The tag is the best part of this post.
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Is depresing that OpenGL is still second to DirectX in 2118 :-/
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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.
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Wot no Better Than Life references?
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“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.
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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.
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You are correct sir, XFX makes both Nvidia and ATI cards.
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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.
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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.
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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..).
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Sure it’s not just your GPU that’s broken? ;)
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Wink and/or nudge. It still bothered me every time they used the word though.
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And it feels so real you can feel the feeling.
“But these cards go to DX11.”
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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.
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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.
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It didn’t lag for me, though i do have a XFX radeon card.
Also, this is a XFX campaign, not ATI.
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Didn’t lag for me, too. Maybe the server is somewhere in my town. Cuz normally even youtube videos lag for me.
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I love the black tape over the wii logo on the mario kart wheel.
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Feels like one of the intro videos from Better Off Ted.
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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.
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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.
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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).
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They’re very similar to those Verdian Dynamics ads on Better Off Ted, which isn’t a bad thing.
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@wahwah I was about to say the same thing. Veridian Dynamics is much better, though.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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!
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Er… why did my sig appear in this post? That looks idiotic. I wasn’t outraged at all (and no one around me suffered).
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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…
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How about around 2x the performance? http://anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3643
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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
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Odd cause the video doesn’t lag for me at all. In fact it ran beautifully for me.
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This game is not good at all playing this game is such a waste of time damn!!!
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