Mooley Eden said someone was driving a F1 car game backstage while in fact they were just playing a video clip. Some people say running pre-recorded videos and make them pass as real demos is OK. They argue that that many companies show pre-recorded demos in fear their technology will fail on stage. And they accept it. But if you don’t have the balls to play with your technology on a stage, then your tech is not really ready for deployment.
We—the journalists and the consumers—should call them out. Not apologize for them. Demos should be live. Otherwise, just play a video and say it’s a video, not a demo. The fact is that you will never have any backstage people to switch to a second computer when your computer crashes. And pretending you are playing while a video plays is boring.
Don’t accept the beta culture. We all should demand reality and never defend companies faking it because “that’s what they all do”.
Eden — general manager for the company’s PC group — showcased the demo for 30 seconds while everyone — including ourselves — watched. Hewas touting the 3D graphics power of Sandy Bridge-based ultrabooks. To demonstrate it, he showed everyone what a great driver he was using F1 2011. However, the only thing he demonstrated was VLC, a plain video playback software running a pre-recorded demo clip.
Does this mean that these ultrabooks are not capable of running advanced games like this? Probably. F1 2011 requires a lot of 3D horsepower that I doubt any ultranotebook can provide at this point. Or maybe this was just an off-site demo recorded on video to avoid any potential demo accidents on stage.
In any case, shame on Intel for trying to fool everyone. Fortunately, Bright Side of News’ Anshel Sag got their lie. [Bright Side of News]