Dissecting Technology Demos

A good demo requires both art and technology. Technology demos should be designed for two roles, to showcase new hardware and to encourage sales. People want to see things done with the new hardware that weren't feasible before. The more interesting and visually appealing the demo, the more coverage it gets in both the industry and mainstream press and more likely it is to make an impression on consumers. The more technically complex the demo, the more likely it is to excite software developers to consider platform-specific graphics quality improvements.

The importance of the technology demo should not be underestimated. Despite all the 'head-to-head' comparisons between ATI and NVIDIA flagship products, the differences aren't as significant as either company would like you to believe. We're not dealing with the era of 3D/fx Voodoo Graphics versus S3 Virge. It's more like Coke versus Pepsi. Sure, NVIDIA has significantly more complex Pixel Shader capabilities, higher color precision and subpixel accuracy but there aren't many real applications that take advantage of it. Likewise, ATI does better with the graphics benchmarks, but at best, it's only a difference of being able to run anisotropic filtering on the X800 XT Platinum and not on the 6800 Ultra. In the end, many people go with the brand-name they prefer and that's where the tech demo comes in. The tech demo is how Sony PlayStation 2 was able to stifle the Sega Dreamcast despite platform parity early on.

Shenhua (Sega Dreamcast)

Old man and Reiko Nagase (Sony PS2)