[vidarh]

But that's the point. Today this is a big distinction that makes it more difficult for many people to appreciate.

When we saw Commodore 64 demos for example, they often impressed even relatively non-technical people.

But today a demo that pushes the limits technically will often only look impressive to those who understand the technical limitations.

That has significantly changed the potential audience to a diminishing subset even if relatively technical people.

[1000100_1000101]

Anyone who plays AAA games knows the currently state of the art and technical limitations. Sure it's not everyone, but a large enough non-technical portion of the population will be able to appreciate it, to some degree.

[vidarh]

This is assuming that they'll look at a non-interactive demo and get why someone would insist on not pre-rendering everything in the first place instead of comparing it against pre-generated video. That was becoming a problem already 20+ years ago in explaining to people what made a given demo impressive, because most people aren't interested in the technical limitations.