Correct, the armor the NM is wearing is the revamped beast armor. Good guess, Hyde:
As for the shader, of course, static rendering and dynamic rendering are not the same thing. The final result will depend a lot on what the AO branch of the Cheetah Dreamworld will retain from the main development tree. When they use the plug-in for AoC, and then compare with the in-game result, honestly there is no disappointment even if it's not the same thing, because we don't watch it the same way: the image is moving. Now, if of course you stop the image and compare, the render in the plug-in is better (but in this case lacks some stuff, like glowing eyes for nanomages).
Just to get an idea (and I am NOT saying we'll have this in AO, or worse or better, NOTHING), here are two screenshots taken in the Dreamworld Cheetah
engine with less than average (I mean it!) options: basically it's set on purpose to be able to run on a 5+ years old computer with AGP video and the jpeg format eats a bit of the result. (But don't expect you'll run correctly the land of Kithai expansion with it, though.)
As for the beta, they still expect sometimes this summer as far as I know. My feeling is they really don't want to show anything that they couldn't deliver in the end. So they are over-cautious. Just my two cents here.
All that said, Hyde had a point on AO forums in a recent post: the
engine will draw people back and will make some stay for a while but the game will need
new content.