Carmack : “360 and PS3 are far from tapped out” + Q&A

Speaking to Wired in a pretty extensive interview, the now-fully-time Oculus Rift tech guy says that there’s “so much you can still do” with the 360 and Ps3.

“There’s so much you can still do on the previous console generation. The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world’s gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things,” he said.

“Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that’s always moving.”

Carmack says it’s something that happens every generation though; just as people really really get to grips with hardware, a new generation of hardware comes along and the cycle is repeated.

“That’s something that we’ve struggled with in every generation. And now I at least know enough to recognize that some of my internal feelings or fondness for technology that I understand or have done various things with usually has to be put aside. Because data has shown over the decades that that’s usually not as important as you think it is.

“Although I keep making new arguments where now we can say that we’re past the knee of the cost-benefit curve in terms of what we get with graphics, and people are saying that with the next-gen consoles, that okay, they look better but they don’t look nearly as much better as the previous generation. So does that mean people will stay happier with the current things? And I could make that argument with a straight face and play for it, but it’s probably going to be wrong,” he added.

He’s probably right though. Look at something like The Last of Us, or Beyond: Two Souls. though it’s obvious that they could look betterit’s really quite remarkable how good they look on such aged hardware.

FULL ARTICLE HERE

Wired Q&A: Doom’s Creator Looks Back on 20 Years of Demonic Mayhem HERE

PS3 yes. 360 on the other hand, right now MS is completely ignoring the system's existence.

Only Crysis 3 looks better than Last Of Us and that required X6 the hardware power, X4 the price with only about 1-2% of pc gamers actually able to play it at such a setting. So yea, Playstation 3 is a beast my friends.

Why is Titanfall also releasing on the X360 then? I don't think they have ignored it completely yet.

As for the article yeah I guess, but some of the multiplats (looking at you Skyrim) barely ran on the PS3. Not to mention some other late multiplats that struggled. I'm sure with time they could squeeze more out of them but for what? Now they can do it better and easier with the next-gen consoles. How can they complain when they have more to work with, and it's easier to develop for? Well sure maybe they're not complaining but still.

You could sqeeze all sorts of power out of the consoles, but is it really worth the effort and time to do so?

What advancement have we seen from Uc2 (09) to now? Nothing. Its even worst on 360 cuz that thing was maxed out long ass time ago

What a dumb argument, that's like saying steam-powered ships technology was far from tapped out, we should cling on it just cause.

Gee.. they couldn't max them out in 8 effin years, maybe we shoulda been stuck on the same gen for another 5 or 6 or so just so Carmack can BS his way from paycheck to paycheck instead of making anything remotely relevant in the past 10 years?

Carmack is really losing his mind these days, did he all ready forget how much consoles held back RAGE?

The 360 hasn't been relevant in years.

The PS3 is still killing it. If the 3DS didn't rock the shit out of life this year then PS3 would be system of the year easily.

I mean look at this year, 1 game released for 360..shame really.

I really don't understand why people would buy another MS console after they've completely ditched first party support midway through their last two consoles life-cycles.

I would never trust them to put out excellent exclusives year in year out like sony has done for every single one of their consoles.

I respect Carmack alot, but he seems to be out of his mind! Devs could still support Nes and Master System, and make great games for them, but it doesn't change the fact that hardware needs to be replaced (i would say every 5 or 6 years) for the industry to move foward.

Yes hardware is almost decade old and still impressing.

It took 8 GD years... To get what they have now in graphics and it's fugly. I pretty sure they are tapped out.

The only games that even surprised me was this year with increased detail were... TLOU and BTS. I can some what believe that PS3 has a tiny bit of juice still not tapped... Only because it's a year younger and a nightmare to work on.

Not much can be done with 512 MB of RAM.

Metro series,crysis series 1 included, tomb raider, total war series and i can go for at least another 30-40 games

A $60 gpu is nearly 3x faster than either console and you think anyone who is gaming on pc does not have at least something on that level and up?

None of these games look even close to last of us,

TLOU had awful frame-rate though. We were in need of new consoles already.

the last of us is not a good looking game. At least try to keep your bullshit trolling straight

I think his words are being exaggerated. I don't think he's necessarily saying games can look much better on the old consoles, he's saying there's a lot of different new rendering methods of various aspects of a 3D engine they could have developed to work with that hardware. This is the kind of thing Carmack does. He's been doing it for years. Look at the next paragraph and the preceeding one where he relates it to the old computer hardware they used for Doom and Quake. Sure he could come up with new ways of doing different things with an engine possible on that hardware but it's not necessarily going to always make games look a lot better. Look at his megatextures. Those kind of got around the problem with the regular way of texture mapping but they brought new problems too. One of which being the amount of space it took was still large. With one configuration of hardware and one architecture you know what you have so you know what you can do on it but I don't think he's saying the overall graphical limits of games could be largely exceeded.

Why do sheep always try to ignore multiplats ? Let us not forget AC4, BF4, COD ghost, Metro LL, Bioshock infinite, Splinter Cell black list, Tomb Raider, Rayman legends, and GTA V. Now i'm not even counting the PS3 Exclusives like TLOU and Ni no Kuni that were really great but.. let's think about it for a second.. can the 3DS games really beat those ? can a link, Fire emblem, and Pokemon game beat 8 good multiplat games(lol COD and BF4)? I don't think so... 3DS was cool.. but it aint got nothing on the big boys. So xbox360 >>>>> 3DS games this year.

Carmack is insane though. He could get Rage to play at 60fps on a Nintendo 3DS if he put his mind to it. What he believes can be done from his perceptions is a lot different than the capabilities of other programmers.

Ok, so i'm a sheep.. Right, let's move past that...

360 games >>>> 3ds games this year? Really???

Infinite/Tomb Raider - Good games. Solid 8/10s.

BF4/COD - Crap

SP: Blacklist/Metro LL/AC4 - Haven't heard anything good about console versions of Metro LL and I haven't heard ANYTHING about Splinter Cell Blacklist. Period. Seems like it was an incredibly forgettable game.

Rayman Legends - PC/Vita definitive versions, but i'll give you that.

GTA 5 - Excellent.

AC4 - PS4/PC definitive versions. Don't even care about AC either. I stopped playing it after no.2. Milked to death. Give it a rest ubi.

So the only good 360 games this year were Bioshock, Tomb Raider, GTA 5 and Rayman Legends... All MULTIPLATS... Cool. Lets look at the 3DS.

Pokemon X/Y

Fire Emblem: Awakening

Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds

Shin Megami Tensei IV

Bravely Default

Ace Attorney: Dual Destinies

Luigi's Mansion 2

Animal Crossing New Leaf

Donkey Kong Country Returns 3D

All EXCLUSIVE games.

This is the thing... Exclusives = / = only games. See when you buy a console... you keep in mind everything you can play on them. Now some of those games are subjective.. i have a 3DS and I didn't like Fre emblem at all because it was far too easy for a Fire Emblem game so it was a let down. Pokemon X/y? the only trainer with 6 pokemons is the champion which she was non existent in the whole game and then she turned out to be crap. There was almost nothing to do post game and the league didn't even give a rematch. In the end it all depends on your taste really, Luigi's mansion and Shin megami tensai were not my cup of tea for example from past entries. Donkey Kong Country Returns is a port of the Wii game a game that already existed before so it's not even new. Zelda i haven't played but it's likely to be good, and Bravely Default i haven't played either but it's probably good also. The main point being you have to get rid of a lot of good games being released in order to say 3DS tops the big boys.

It's not just about programmer ability though. It's a vanishing point of diminishing returns and money AND time.

Yeah, you could spend an extra 25 million, god knows how many more man hours and the end result could be TLOU without a shitty framerate and with better AA. But who cares at that point? If they had done that, the game would be coming out next year and would never even hope to recoup the cost of development.

It's funny how people take his word as the word of god. He's human and says stupid shit too. This being one of those times.

He took a one second look at the spec sheets of the Ps4 and Xbone and said they're pretty much identical, then everyone took that as the word of god... in that case he just meant that the architectures are pretty similar.

And I don't care how good a programmer he is, the games he works on are trash and not only that look like trash. I'm not taking anything away from the guy, but this isn't the 90's anymore.

You also took out a couple 3DS games in order to say 360 > 3DS. Which is fine.

At the end of the day, it comes down to your tastes. My original comment was just an opinion.

Look at GTA V and The Last Of Us, you can do a lot with just that amount of ram. The thing is most next gen games don't have animations that are equally good let alone better than these two games.

The Last of Us looks nice for a console but there are plenty of games for PC that make it look horrible that have been out for years. While these comparisons within the console world are nice it is much better to have console games that don't look ancient to PC gamers as well.