AMD Radeon HD 6850 and 6870 Video Card Preview

The New Mecha Rampage Demo

AMD has been showed off a Mech demo on the Radeon HD 4800 series, a Mecha demo with the Radeon HD 5800 series and now with the Radeon HD 6800 series they are showing off the Mecha Rampage demo.

This demo shows off the power of the Radeon HD 6800 series of graphics
processors with cutting edge features like Microsoft DirectX 11, Bullet
Physics, DirectCompute and tons of tessellation.

AMD was able to do rapid prototyping with Dynamic Deferred Lighting and as a result there are thousands of lights in the scene with numerous lighting effects taking place on any one of the lights.

Programers used Autodesk Maya 2011 with AMD’s plug-in for Vision Engine 8, which is how they were able to get the demo done in just a couple weeks. This plug-in allowed developers to use Maya Embedded Language (MEL) for scripting. This greatly simplifies tasks in Autodesk’s 3D Graphics Software Maya as they were able to add thousands of lights in just a few lines of MEL. Let’s take a quick look at a video we shot of AMD’s demonstration of this technology. Be warned the video cuts off abruptly at the end as our battery ran out of juice at a very bad time. We figured a couple minutes of video is better than no video though!

We hope you enjoyed this quick glance of the future of AMD video cards. Be sure to check back with us later this week as we will have an in-depth review of the cards!