Comment by GuB-42

I consider the early years of 3d acceleration to be pretty bad days for the demoscene on the "high end" side.

Problem was that fixed pipelines were seriously limiting. Most of the cool effects of software rendering couldn't be done, and the lack of direct access to the hardware meant that you couldn't do many of the hardware tricks the demoscene is known for. It doesn't mean people couldn't be creative, but it was mostly limited to doing interesting 3D geometry and textures. Things started changing with the advent of shaders.

About AI, I think thing the demoscene is rather welcoming of "AI" as long as you use it creatively instead of doing what everyone else does (slop). In the topic of Gaussian splatting, look at the Revision 2025 invitation [1], there is a pretty cool scene featuring it, people loved that part.

[1] https://www.pouet.net/prod.php?which=103537