Alleged live demonstration goes wrong, to say the least

Jan 10, 2012 08:57 GMT  ·  By

Intel really wanted to persuade people that ultrabooks were going to support DirectX 11, but the method it chose to achieve that goal was rather underhanded.

Being the IT giant that it is, Intel obviously secured a large space at the 2012 CES trade show.

Its goal was to outline the strategy for the promotion of those super-thin and light mobile personal computers called ultrabooks.

Unfortunately, the so-called 'live' demonstration of DirectX 11 support turned out to be a fake.

What truly happened was that Intel's Mooly Eden pretended to play F1 2011 in front of a video recording.

The VLC media player on-screen controls even popped into view a few times, as reported by the folks at VR-Zone and BSN.

Intel did not issue any disclaimer to say that the 'live' demo was actually just a pre-recorded footage.

Nevertheless, it was more a mimicry of playing F1 during the 'live' demo of the Intel Ultrabook.

We aren't exactly sure why Intel would go to such lengths to convince people that Ultrabooks will handle DirectX 11 games.

All it accomplished through this 'live' demo was show that it itself doesn't expect the laptops to run F1 at a reasonable frame rate, at least not in their current state.

It mostly took away from the mood it set by handing out 50 ASUS “Zenbook” Ultrabooks (they were randomly placed under some of the seats in the conference room).

At least the video recorded by the folks at BSN shows Mooly acting fairly upbeat about the whole thing.

At this point, the Santa Clara, California-based company is asking the world to take it at its word that Ultrabooks will handle DirectX 11 processing.

Unfortunately, we can't help but feel that Intel would have been better off just making a promise to that effect (while playing the recording in the background perhaps) instead of pulling this questionable move.