Intel caught faking CES ultrabook gaming demo Intel has been caught faking a demo at its press conference during the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. On Monday, general manager of Intel's PC Client Group Mooly Eden demoed an Ivy Bridge ultrabook playing a Formula One driving game to display the graphics capability of the system. With a steering wheel on the podium …
> My Samsung NC10 plays 720p easily and can, with the right codec, do 1080p.
Care to elaborate? The NC10 only has a resolution of 1024x600. Have you tried hooking up a Full HD TV and running it as a second display of 1920x1080?
My Dell 10v can't handle it either, so don't feel bad. Why I threw it aside and bought a regular notebook when my annual bonus came in.
You are aware that only some netbooks are capable of playing 720p, and very few 1080p, and all depends on the processor+graphics hardware ... which the poster didn't mention. So yours can, whoopee. An ASUS EEE 1015PX can certainly manage 720p with no problem, and also 1080p in some situations (e.g YouTube), whereas a 1015PN has an NVidia chip so has no problems at all with 1080p in any situation.
So no, nothing wrong with his netbook
My netbook is about 18 months old and can just about play a 720p video though it occasionally stutters or drops frames. A larger and more recent laptop (costing £399) has no trouble at all playing them even 1080p and can even make a pretty decent job of playing Portal 2 at medium settings.
I would sure as hell hope an ultrabook costing 2x again should be able to play games and videos with very few problems. Maybe it wouldn't play games on ultra settings, but it should be able to do them on medium at least.
the video was recorded on different hardware. If the video was recorded on the tin he was demoing then it is arguably a lot less fake than any recent Apple advert (sequences fabricated to increase gullibility). I can see why a senior exec would not want a Gates BSOD moment and why the techies might not want to show the world how good their exec was at playing a game...
I might agree with you, except for this bit: "...and because the game takes a couple of minutes to load..."
I would view a demonstration of pressing a button and something happening as meaning that is what happens; not that someone paused time for 2 minutes to allow the hardware to actually do what is shown.
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Back when I were a nipper, games took anywhere between 5-10 minutes to load from a cassette, complete with horrible screeching noises. Even then, we counted ourselves lucky if we didn't get a Read Error B at the end of it.
Goddamn punk kids, spoiled rotten these days....
Read Error B. FFFFFUUUUUUU.
If the netbook could handle playing the game smoothly, okay, maybe I'll believe that. But running a video recording app AND playing game in decent res at the max of it's spec? I'm willing to bet it was a video from different platform.
Next time, have one with the game pre-loaded (we're not judging loading times) but paused (immediate impact!), or just admit it can't run it. Just look like amateurs now.
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A presentation is a presentation - it's hard to present and do a good job of it, so I'm fine if they use videos for it. However, if I get that machine and it doesn't do what you claim it does, then expect trouble.
Surely, someone like Intel should be able to simply rig up an identical machine in their stand that is really playing the game, and either let the public play it, or have someone playing it live? The presentation might be faked, but even the laziest journalist would see it for real when doing even the most basic of checks on the story. Seems as much a PR fail as anything else.
I've seen a crash or blue screen at almost every product launch I've ever been to, all the way back to WfW 3.10 (yes, there was Windows for Workgroups 3.10), it'd feel wrong if there wasn't one.
I have, on occasion felt sorry for the guys on stage but I'm always disappointed when I don't see one and suspect trickery, having event management company owners in the family I know 'rigged' demos happen far more often than most people would suspect.
But i do recall seriously considering writing a controller input recorder that could then be applied to a game running at 1/10th speed, so that the effective framerate could be speeded up by 10x on playback. Glad we went down the line of monster hardware specs instead though, so we could demo it live at reasonable framerate.
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Yup - this is a simple solution to the problem.
Did they only have one prototype? Then start the game before the beginning of the presentation, and open the presentation with the game demo, then gun the game and do the rest of the presentation. Even if the PR guy couldn't play the game for crap, it shows the capabilities of the game just as well driving down the highway, as it does swerving across traffic and into a drainage ditch.
It's really hard to excuse what they did there, and it looks really bad for them.
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My netbook (Lenovo Thinkpad X100e) plays Full HD videos just fine, no matter what codec or bitrate. But then it does have an AMD Athlon Neo processor and Radeon HD 3200 graphics and not just an Atom with GMA500.
