Technology demo

A technology demo is a prototype or an incomplete version of a product, which primary purpose is to showcase the performance, methods or features of a particular technology. It can be used to demonstrate to the investors, partners or potential customers the viability of the chosen approach and persuade them that the future product will be a success.

Gaming industry

Technology demos are often used in computer industry, emerging as an important tool in response to short development cycles, in game development and graphics industry in particular. Computer game developers use technology demos to maintain interest to titles still early in development (because game engines are usually ready before the art is finished) and ensure compatibity by early testing. Graphics cards manufacturers use them to showcase the advanced performance of their cards even before there are any games that can deliver that performance or before the product is ready to be used outside of the development labs.

Being much less interactive than complete games, technology demos for graphics cards can deliver substantially better image quality. Because the games need to provide more varied and more complex environments, less processing resources can be spent on the quality, making games lag several years behind video card technology demos.

In November 2002 nVidia started the practice of featuring realistic female characters in graphics card technology demos by releasing Dawn for its GeForce FX card. The demo featured a scantly clad forest fairy with semi-realistic short hair and beautiful translucent wings. Later it released a similar Dusk demo with a fairy dressed in black leather. Later ATI Technologies joined the race with its DoubleCross demo featuring a female special agent Ruby for the X800 launch, a few weeks after nVidia released Nalu, a mermaid demo with a complex hair simulation, for the GeForce 6800.

Technology demos were also used by console manufacturers to promote them before the release.