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The Art of the Tech Demo
Alan writes "A lot of people underestimate the significance of a good technology demo. A good tech demo can be more important for a GPU product launch than even benchmarks. However, this means more than just pretty graphics or complex shaders. In my final article to the industry, I explain what the art of the tech demo is all about.
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Yup. I can attest to that. Being part of a GPU design team myself.
If only we hadn't have used the goatse man as part of our tech presentation on the big night, we might still be around.
--
The last digit of pi is four.
...Boobs! - They seem to be rather obvious to show off high polycount and advanced shading techniques. Furthermore they are also a good place to show off your great dynamic-body-physics-engine(TM).
... insert more good reasons to show boobs in tech demos here...
You must be new here. You act as if any of this is news.
Its the naked pixies that influence my GPU purchases. If I am going to drop $500.00 on the latest GPU it better have a naked pixie tech demo. Errr wait didn't NVIDIA try that . . .it didn't make me buy their leaf blower GPU. (remote power station not included - see store for details)
Is how to rig it, of course. To misquote a phrase, any sufficiently advanced technology can be simulated by a rigged demo :-)
Bears, balls, tits and ass. All good tech demos speak to this reality.
id software has also been doing tech demos for years.
The only difference is that other companies wind up making actual games with their licensed technology.
-CausticPuppy "Of all the people I know, you're certainly one of them." -Somebody I don't know
Heh. I remember watching a crappy show on a local cable access channel that had all sorts of music on it that I thought sounded familiar. I thought about it for a while until I remembered that they were all demo songs from a Roland synth.
- ------- There are ten kinds of people in the world. Those who understand binary, and those who... Huh?
The article starts off nicely with:
:-)
Most people here would agree that ATI's latest technology demo, 'The Doublecross' starring their new mascot Ruby (Download the video here) is superbly done.
including a screenshot from said demo. I particularly like the way you can see the scenery behind the girl through her mouth.
I suppose 'superbly' applies to either the realistic look on the girls face, when apparently the back of her head is missing, or that she must have a display in her mouth that displays what's recorded by a camera on the back of her head.
Either way, very impressive!
Just kidding!
That's very insightful. Remember what Oracle did to become the biggest database company in the world? They did presentations, not demos. If you wanted to see the database working, you had to buy it. The salesman would not show you the actual database during his pitch.
That led to the old joke, playing on Oracle's support for many computer platforms:
Q: What platform does Oracle database run best on?
A: A 35mm slide projector.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
St. Peter gives hime a lute shows him to a cloud and instructs him to sit on the cloud, play the lute and rejoice.
So the Oracle salesman sits on the cloud, plays the lute and rejoices. Evening comes and St. Peter is coming to the salesmans cloud and asks him how he likes it in heaven.
The guy goes: I'm honest with you, St.Peter. I think it's a pretty bland place."
OK, says St. Peter, instructs the salesguy to follow him and takes him to the express elevator that leads straight to the gates of hell.
St. Peter knocks and the door is opened by Lucifer himself. Behind Lucifer there's an unbelievable scene to be viewed:
Miles and miles of white beach. A nice surf on the ocean. Muscle bound young men and tasty looking bikini clad girls play beach volleyball. Laughter fills the air. There are piles of food and multiple open bars (with an outstanding selection of single malt whiskies).
After having taken in the view St. Peter leads the Oracle guy back to the express elevator which takes them straight up back to heaven.
"Well", says St. Peter. "You have seen what hell is all about and you have to make your final decision now. Do you want to stay in heaven, sitting on a cloud, playing your lute and rejoice, or do you want to go back to hell? But, whatever you do: Your decision is final and can't be changed."
"Alright", sais the sales guy. "I think I rather chose hell".
"Fine", says St. Peter, guides him to the express elevator and down he goes; straight back to the gates of hell.
He knocks and almost burns his knuckles from the hot door. Lucifer opens with a smile and a complete different scenery evolves behind Lucifer:
There's fire and heat everywhere; torchured people with pained faces try to escape their miseries. The screams and yells of the tormented fill the air.
The Oracle salesman is stunned and says: "But, but... this is incredible. I've been here only 15 minutes ago and this place was completely differen!"
"Well", smiles Lucifer: "That was the demo..."
Ok, it's old, but nevertheless illustrates the power of good demo...
ich bin der musikant
mit taschenrechner in der hand
kraftwerk
Back in the days, making a demo was about showing off "software"-skills. A demo was all about coding fancy effects on a broad range of hardware with no support for hardware acceleration whatsoever. :(
Ahh, but now, unfortunately, it seems to have gone the way of "We aren't even going to try to run on your machine unless you have pixel shaders". Which is really annoying as every now and again (every few months), I remember about demos and go and hunt some down, download what are currently rated as the best and then find out I can actually run about 1 in 20 of them...
Man I wish I had money, I so want a 9600XT