Carmack sceptical about consoles, physics boards

Hyped up performance figures, he believes

By INQUIRER staff: Tuesday 16 August 2005, 11:26
AMD ZONE celebrated its seventh birthday to coincide with Quakecon, and has some interesting coverage of the keynote, delivered by id Software's John Carmack.

He had some interesting things to say about the forthcoming next generation consoles performance figures, which he thinks are being hyped up.

Indeed, he suggests they won't show much boost over today's high end PCs, and will fall behind in performance sooner rather than later.

There's more on his views about rendering, Moore's Law and "physics" based cards, all here. µ

Handicapping the next-gen consoles
Carmack started out by offering his assessment of the current state of PC gaming hardware, noting that he is largely satisfied with current trends. He marveled for a moment over the advances made in recent years, especially in graphics, and looked forward to continued progress on most fronts. Ever the PC guy, Carmack observed that the upcoming generation of game consoles looks to be very powerful, but said that PCs will, of course, be much more powerful than these consoles thanks to PC hardware's rate of progress.
The quintessential PC game programmer then dropped a bit of a bombshell by announcing that he had recently moved his primary development efforts over to the Xbox 360, and that he expected to continue development there for the next six months -- although the PC version of id Software's next game will still be released first. One of his reasons for the move to Xbox 360 for development, Carmack said, was the headache of driver issues on the PC platform. The several layers of abstraction on the PC make it hard to nail down exact graphics performance because the programmer is held at a distance from the hardware. By contrast, the Xbox 360's more direct approach was "refreshing." Carmack also praised Microsoft's development environment as easily the best of any of the consoles, thanks to the company's background as a software provider.

Posted by Brandon Shipe on 12.08. at 12:49

All three "sessions" have been split up (the Presentation and Q&A in one zip, Carmack's Keynote Speech in the other) and it's important to keep in mind that:

1) The volume was extremely low the entire time
2) The feed died during the id Software Presentation, so just skip ahead if you need to
3) Sound was off during most of the id Software Presentation
4) You'll need Winamp in order to view all of the files

Posted by Brandon Shipe on 12.08. at 15:55 I had to start and stop a number of times, but I will try to update the Outline later on tonight. Enjoy.

id Outline: - Updated: 12:07 AM EDT 8/13

- 2:49: Stream working just fine. Tim is about to show off vehicles and other content from Q4
- 2:52: It seems as though they forgot to turn the camera for the gameplay footage, but all is well now
- 2:55: They just finished showing the intro vid and intro gameplay scene for Q4 SP
- 2:57: Streams 1 and 2 both died, Stream 3 seems to work
- 2:58: Sound died on Stream 3
- 2:59: Sound dead on all three streams; all three streams work again
- 2:59: They appear to be showing more of the storyline, but can't tell what's going on
- 3:05: Audio still gone for everyone
- 3:07: Q4 SP "trailer" now over
- 3:10: Audio back up!
- 3:11: System Specs - "If your machine played Doom 3 well, it'll play Quake 4 well"
- 3:13: CD release basically required because too many people bring back DVD versions of games
- 3:13: Special Edition of Q4 - Only shipping on DVD, "cool surprises" included
- 3:14: Once you receive "implant", you can understand what Strogg are saying and the various GUI's on the computer screens
- 3:17: Q4 Q&A Session over; John Carmack coming out
- 3:25: Simultaneous console release - X360 and PS3 mentioned
- 3:25: PC version may come out before or at same time as console version
- 3:27: Development has been made easier thanks to far fewer vid chips to develop for
- 3:30: Carmack will buckle down on X360 development for next 6 months or so
- 3:30: PC version will then be checked again to be sure drivers at that time work fine
- 3:30: Carmack not happy with Microsoft's stance on OpenGL vs. D3D
- 3:34: Carmack warns that technology in next-gen consoles not "as powerful as it sounds"
- 3:35: In comparison to high-speed AMD/Intel system, X360 runs about half as fast
- 3:36: Multi-processing isn't easy to work with despite access to powerful VGA cards
- 3:38: The "return" from multi-processing on future platforms won't be as glorious as some originally thought
- 3:40: Parallel programming = tough, even on consoles; performance benefit vs. extra time
- 3:41: Questions use of multi-processors; thinks out-of-order processors would've been better for this generation; expects next-gen to be better for parallel processing
- 3:43: Wishes that developers could create Lord of the Rings-quality graphics in games
- 3:47: Carmack receives bottle of water on cue
- 4:00: Carmack discusses more development "stuff"
- 4:03: No more Punkbuster from here on out (Q4)
- 4:07: It's not really about the source code, but rather the execution; developers "over-value" source code
- 4:29: Carmack is not looking forward to seperate physics cards; too complicated
- 4:48: Carmack sold his Ferrari F50 recently; using BMW X5; wife using Z8
- 4:51: $100 million games are just around the bend
- 4:51: More manpower = more money
- 4:53: Carmack Keynote is complete


Other notes from the speech:

- id Software will be releasing the source code (GPL) for Quake III within the next week or two
- Carmack would like to see more programmers hop on the GPL train; urges developers not to be afraid to create their retail games based off of the GPL
- Carmack seemed to side with Microsoft more than Sony; seemed to "shrug" off Cell processor for design reasons
- "There will be the developers that go ahead and have a miserable time and do get good performance out of some of these multi-core approaches, and the Cell is worse than others in some respects here"
- The "decisions" made by hardware developers will determine how much of a return game developers will get
- Graphics drivers have slowed down process of creation for developers like Carmack; drivers "don't do what [developers] say, but what they think they meant"
- Thin API layer on the X360 has helped tremendously in releiving devs of the frustration typically dealt with when constructing games for the PC (due to drivers)