Carmack: PCs “an order of magnitude” more powerful than consoles

Dark Sun

Dark Sun

Dark Sun

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Yesterday Tim caught up with id Software co-founder John Carmack for a frank discussion about the evolving technology powering the games industry, and why advances on the PC in recent years have convinced him to make a “large change of direction” in the way he develops games.

The main reason for this? Sheer processing power. When Carmack started developing Rage, consoles and the PC were roughly equivalent. Now Carmack says “we have an order of magnitude more power on the PCs.”

“Now that we’re looking on PCs that have ten times the horsepower of the consoles I’m making a large change in my direction” he says. “we should be focusing on building things efficiently on the PC and deploying on the consoles.”

“There’s several developers that if you said ‘Go for it’ on here we would make vastly better looking stuff if we really made that our focus.”

So what’s stopping that from happening? Carmack says that there are a few barriers to PC development, but the main one is cold hard economics.

“To do best of breed on here takes years to develop an engine and develop the content to go with it, and you’ll just run yourself out of business doing things that way,” he says.

“Those just end up being the cold hard economic truths, that you can spent $100 million working on a game now, and if you did that focused on the PC you’d be out of business.”
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PC GAMER
 
We recently spoke with Id Software co-founder John Carmack about some of the technical benefits we’ll get from playing Rage on PC instead of consoles. Without the texture memory limits of the Xbox 360 and PS3, we can expect sharper textures, even at lower resolutions. At high resolutions, we can expect close to “three times the unique pixels the consoles can.”

It’s best to let technical wizard John Carmack explain this one. “One of the significant things that’s not really obvious is that because we break everything up into these texture pages, the consoles are limited because they don’t have enough memory and on the PS3 you can’t go larger than a 4096 squared texture,” he says.

“There’s a lot of scenes that really need more than that on there, so a lot of scenes sort of hit an upper limit on the consoles, where on the PC where we can use an 8k by 8k texture for that we can bring in higher fidelity. So even if you’re running the PC version at 720p resolution you’ll get crisper graphics on there.

“If you crank it all the way up to run at 1080p or higher then you can put of twice, probably closer to three times the unique pixels the consoles can.”

So there you have it. Carmack also mentions that high end graphics cards will be able to run the game well with anti-aliasing,
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I look forward to carmack making a game for my pentium 4 3.0 torrent machine which looks an order of magnitude better then my ps3.

oh wait, we don't all have the same pc's thus making it a daft statement.
 
The console is easy and cheap for people to use that is why it is more popular, many people cant afford to spend £400+ on a gaming PC, neither can they be bothered to learn how to install an OS, drivers, graphics/sound/options etc.

Therefore there is a bigger market for console games so more money for developers to make, I just hope BF3 is what I hope it is and is aimed more for the PC gamer market which is like a desert now with nothing decent to play, not sure how big this market is but there is certainly room for a big fish in a small pond.
 
It seems DICE have got the right idea - program for the PC as the primary platform and then just scale things down for the consoles. Dunno why this is so difficult for many devs.
 
ic1male said:
It seems DICE have got the right idea - program for the PC as the primary platform and then just scale things down for the consoles. Dunno why this is so difficult for many devs.
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True I think most PC gamers just hate all this recent trend of making games for the console then lazily porting it onto the PC and expecting them to buy it, gives the impression they can't be bothered with PC gamers, fine we can't be bothered with their games then!, surely there is enough PC gamers out there to warrant some effort..
 
Spetznaz said:
The console is easy and cheap for people to use that is why it is more popular, many people cant afford to spend £400+ on a gaming PC, neither can they be bothered to learn how to install an OS, drivers, graphics/sound/options etc.

Therefore there is a bigger market for console games so more money for developers to make, I just hope BF3 is what I hope it is and is aimed more for the PC gamer market which is like a desert now with nothing decent to play, not sure how big this market is but there is certainly room for a big fish in a small pond.
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Yet they then spend at minimum usually more like £20 more on games, then buy all the accessories like Kinect or Wii board etc, and the cost of the system soon adds up.

You also have to remember that you don't buy a PC just for gaming, its also a PC with all the functionality that entails.
 
Klo said:
Yet they then spend at minimum usually more like £20 more on games, then buy all the accessories like Kinect or Wii board etc, and the cost of the system soon adds up.

You also have to remember that you don't buy a PC just for gaming, its also a PC with all the functionality that entails.
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Yep I suppose it is somewhat short sighted, but they probably have their laptop/ipad for other stuff rather than a big unfashionable 'PC box thing'.

:rolleyes:
 
What made me most sad is that he said something on the lines of you can't invest a big budget into PC game as you'll end up broke. PC market is not big enough for high budget titles.

And well its true, consoles is where the money is, there is little incentive for the big game developers to invest money into a PC project.

Pretty much means if its only PC game the budget will be comparatively small and therefore no breakthrough in graphics or game play thus the games will never be able to take advantage of all the computing power a PC has to offer.

So consoles life cycle directly dictates the technological progress in games.
 
Consoles and pc were roughly equivilant? I very much doubt that. Consoles were dated from the day their spec was finalised, pc keeps on evolving.
 
dalin80 said:
I look forward to carmack making a game for my pentium 4 3.0 torrent machine which looks an order of magnitude better then my ps3.

oh wait, we don't all have the same pc's thus making it a daft statement.
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John Carmack is one of the most respected graphics programmers in the industry, you can cry semantics all you like it still doesn't change a thing, he's completely right.
 
dalin80 said:
I look forward to carmack making a game for my pentium 4 3.0 torrent machine which looks an order of magnitude better then my ps3.

oh wait, we don't all have the same pc's thus making it a daft statement.
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Well..if we're going to throw old PCs into the equation let's throw some old consoles too. I'm sure that P4 could put my old SNES to shame.
 
Always a pleasure to listen to John Carmack speak about gaming and development, thanks for the link. :) I just hope someone remembers to video the Quakecon keynote speech this year.
 
The pro console trend is a reflection on any other market in real life. Simpler + Cheaper + Faster (dev time) = more profit. Unfortunately simple economics will keep consoles at the top I doubt this will ever change. PC's will be best for niche games (mmo, indie games) but won't dominate anything else. Dice has bucked the trend doing BF3 pro pc but it will be interesting to see if other dev's follow or even if their own next title will go a similar path.
 
Gerard said:
Consoles and pc were roughly equivilant? I very much doubt that. Consoles were dated from the day their spec was finalised, pc keeps on evolving.
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In 2005 when the Xbox 360 came out, I believe it was more powerful than the average PC at the time. Obviously not true at all any more.
 
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