John Carmack: PS3/Xbox 360 are "Far From Tapped Out"

[StewShearerOld]

John Carmack: PS3/Xbox 360 are "Far From Tapped Out"

Doom-creator John Carmack believes that there's "so much you can still do" on the PS3 and Xbox 360.

The PlayStation 4 and Xbox One both released to the public last month, prompting a rush of gamers who eagerly emptied their wallets to bring home their own personal slice of the new console generation. As happy as many are to see console hardware against moving forward, however, there are some within the industry itself that might have preferred a little more patience.

Doom-creator John Carmack, for instance, believes that Xbox 360 and PS3 weren't quite past their prime. "There's so much you can still do on the previous console generation," he said. "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." According to Carmack, who <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/129920-John-Carmack-Departs-Id-Software>recently departed his studio id Software, the current push forward represents less of necessary change and more of "tidal wave of technology" that, in some ways, can keep developers from doing their best work.

"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," he said. "That's something that we've struggled with in every generation." It's not hard to understand the root of his frustrations. The past few years have seen developers release some of the most <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/editorials/reviews/10366-The-Last-of-Us-Review-A-New-Apocalypse>notable games of the PS3/Xbox 360 generation, something they were able to do in no small part because of the comfort many had developed with the hardware over the past several years.

That being the case, Carmack acknowledges that it's all just part of how things work in the industry. "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," he said. "Data has shown over the decades that that's usually not as important as you think it is." Regardless of what the "data" says, it's not hard to sympathize some with developers who, by-and-large, now have now new systems to learn and make games for. Some have <a href=http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/view/128507-Killzone-Dev-Says-PS4-A-Lot-More-Demanding>already noted the emerging challenges of the new generation and only time can tell how long it takes before developers regain that feeling of knowing the hardware like the back of their hand.

Source: <a href=http://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2013-12-11-john-carmack-laments-next-gen-push>GamesIndustry International


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[Saulkar]

Wait, whut? Whut, Wait?! Pumpkin WHAT?!


Was John Carmack, not for the longest time, talking about their limitations and how there was little more to be done with them at many a convention? The 7th generations consoles as near as I can tell are stagnant. GTA V was the last game that squeesed any last juice out of the consoles, and did a damn fine job if I must say so myself. That is not to say that great games cannot still be made on them, far from it. Merely that there is little, if any, wiggle room left to push the boundaries of technology on them.

CAPTCHA: that's all, folks - I would say so, but what do I know?

 

[CardinalPiggles]

Notice how he was careful not to mention performance. The old consoles were tapped out in that regard. Look at games like Crysis 3, Far cry 3 and GTA V, even they showed cracks. I stopped playing GTA V because of the bad frame rate and the annoying input lag.

Make a triple A game in 1080p resolution running at 60fps with less than 10ms of input lag and then tell me that the old consoles aren't tapped out.

 

[Saulkar]

I stopped playing GTA V because of the bad frame rate and the annoying input lag.

Do tell. I have seen significant amounts of gameplay for GTA V and the performance looked pretty good (then again when I got into PC gaming I played games from 1998 at <10FPS for years XD) but I want to hear your experience playing.

On the other hand, I know that some video capture software can go on a frame-by-frame basis and play back what was a 1FPS mess at a proper 30-60FPS. This makes me wonder if hardware capture cards can do this and thus bias the results.

 

[tdylan]

"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," he said. "That's something that we've struggled with in every generation."

To the cynic in me that sounds like "come on! We finally understand the current tech to the point that it's most cost-efficient for use to develop for it, and instead of letting us reap the rewards of all the time we spent figuring it out, we now have to learn a new tech."

Yes, I do see the frustration: you open a business in Spain, but you have a difficult time building a repoire with the locals due to not fully understanding the language. Right when you become fluent in Spanish, someone decides "we're shipping you to our new start-up in Germany."

 

[AstaresPanda]

i agree but.... its been almost a decade, and the longest console generation so far, if you dont get most of them now then.....im not sure what to say.

 

[Ed130 The Vanguard]

Really? Wasn't the issues with GTA enough of a wake up call, or the lack of a holstering summation in ME3 due to memory issues, or Skyrims less than stellar PS3 version? (which could be due to Bethesda being useless or the CELL possessor instead but still)

If gaming was static and the high-end PC platform didn't exist perhaps the last gen of consoles could have stuck around for longer, however we a in a world where the visual quality of AAA titles has been pushed beyond the the limits of the PS3 and 360.

 

[CardinalPiggles]

I stopped playing GTA V because of the bad frame rate and the annoying input lag.

Do tell. I have seen significant amounts of gameplay for GTA V and the performance looked pretty good (then again when I got into PC gaming I played games from 1998 at <10FPS for years XD) but I want to hear your experience playing.

On the other hand, I know that some video capture software can go on a frame-by-frame basis and play back what was a 1FPS mess at a proper 30-60FPS. This makes me wonder if hardware capture cards can do this and thus bias the results.

I suppose it may be because over the past couple of years I've just got used to 60fps and almost zero input lag so reverting back to poor performance (by PC standards) is extremely frustrating. It wasn't worth putting up with for me.

But if you're someone who is used to 30fps (or less) then I imagine it's absolutely fine. It's a great game.

Also if you use a monitor/TV that has a refresh rate of 30 hertz you wouldn't even notice the difference anyway.

Can't speak for capture software myself because I've never used it.

 

[Covarr]

He's wrong. All PS3s and Xbox 360s completely stopped working as soon as their successors were released. At least, I assume they must have, since people keep whining about backwards compatibility, as though they can't use their older consoles anymore.

P.S. Thanks

 

[Strazdas]

Make a triple A game in 1080p resolution running at 60fps with less than 10ms of input lag and then tell me that the old consoles aren't tapped out.

He did. It was called Doom.
No, really, Doom was programmed on a PC running 1080p and the FPS was limited by hardware only and could reach 60. No significant lag at least when i played it.

 

[Vivi22]

or Skyrims less than stellar PS3 version? (which could be due to Bethesda being useless or the CELL possessor instead but still)

If I had to guess it would probably be the different memory in the PS3, combined with Bethesda's total incompetence. Actually, might as well just state a simple rule of thumb: "never chalk up to hardware failings what can be credited to Bethesda's complete incompetence."

Anyway, I agree with the guy who said it sounds like he's more talking about being able to get more out of them as far as cost and time to develop goes. Thing's are getting increasingly difficult financially for a lot of AAA developers, and quite frankly, almost none of them ever do anything aside from prettier graphics that really necessitates new hardware. But we can't have those hardware manufacturers not releasing consoles, or getting beaten to the punch by something newer, so everything marches forward, budgets increase, and fewer companies can afford to compete. And honestly, I've seen nothing in the coming generation that says to me the newer hardware is going to be any better utilized for new gameplay experiences than the old stuff.

Of course then again, it's always possible that Carmack, being a literal genius at pretty much anything but especially programming, is sitting back thinking, "why's everyone in such a hurry? They haven't tapped into half the power they actually could if they had an understanding of programming and optimization that matches my own."

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

I'm wondering if he actually saw Rage running on the consoles. It was bad enough on PC, but my god did his "megatexturing" allot the shittiest and worst textures to a machine with 256mb RAM available, with them streaming in and out all over the place. Think about that John, a machine in 2013 running on 512MB RAM. "Tapped out" in this respect refers to all the programming tricks, rendering at sub 720 and upscaling, and allowing some or most scenes to render at 20-25 fps if they can look fluid enough to the untrained eye.

People want better than that now, even people who don't realize the things I've mentioned above, and that's from a performance perspective as opposed to a graphical one. He also is speaking under the assumption that the PS360 are to be dropped now that PS4 and X1 are a thing. We're still going to be wowed the way Shadow of the Colossus did on PS2 in 2005, and the way God of War II did on PS2 in 2007. Dark Souls 2 is coming in March, on "current hardware" months after the next-gen machines. They'll still keep coming.

Us folks on PC have access to resolutions far above 1080p, performance far above 60 fps, games stretched beyond even 2 screens, and practically every game in 3D with advanced physics. The fact that the consoles "catching up" still includes 720p and 30fps puts the PS360 far, far back relative to what one could call a "current experience".

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

sounds about right; I think most designers whining about not having more power fell into the category of "didn't know how to optimize or be efficient with design." If someone is whining about power more than likely they're trying to disguise their ineptitude and incompetence. Especially when it'd proven ad infinitum that you don't need cutting edge tech to make great games.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

Snip

It's worth mentioning how much "optimization" costs. A big chunk of these costs come from a lot of expensive programming work just making the game playable within what are now extreme limitations. For example, when I played Dragon's Dogma I realized how much it must have cost just to put that game in a releasable state. The black bars on the top and bottom of the screen are to reduce the pixels of the render just so it hovers around 30fps, and they were constantly playing with the Depth of Field of the open world so that the then-current consoles could perfectly handle it.

Basically, my point is that more powerful hardware doesn't necessarily mean that the costs rise proportionally. Having 5-6GB of usable RAM compared to 256MB makes the programmers and other people's jobs much easier, not having to constantly adjust every factor in an effort to avoid going "over RAM". I think publishers complaining about games being expensive was multifaceted, being 1 part their usual desire to make as much money as possible and have it sound like they don't have any, 1 part making the worlds bigger and the graphics better while working under a static and unchanging hardware limitation.

The other side of this is that we now know that making hyper-realistic super graphically advanced games is mostly the choice and desire of the industry and publishers themselves. They want to out-do each other and move the bar forward. Look at Minecraft, Terraria, The Walking Dead, Hotline Miami, Papers Please...games that put their beauty in places other than graphical prowess and the gaming public ate them all up. And it's not just PC players, all of those games other than Papers, Please were happily welcomed and thrived on the PS3, 360, and Vita.

 

[vallorn]

Snip

Not only that but due to the common hardware between the consoles and the PC, the costs for making ports should be reduced as well. That and the more leeway that the slightly faster processors and more RAM gives to them should honestly alleviate the need for processing tricks like how GTAV streamed it's data from the hard drive and game disk at the same time to make everything work. Also it means no more CELL processor nonsense. I love my PS3 but the CELL is a server and mainframe focused CPU which is a ruddy nightmare to optimize for on top of the oddly distributed memory (And the fact it's 2X 256Mb... How the hell can people defend two, quarter gigs of RAM split up like that in 2013 when even a low end graphics card tends to have 1Gig of VRAM just to itself let alone the RAM on the motherboard.) Still... Yes we might not have completely tapped out these consoles but we've hit the law of diminishing returns where to squeeze more out we have to start doing arcane wizardry with the hardware (GTAV) and sacrifice virgins to the CELL overlord... Also the 360 only recently got fixed from it's permanently on the edge of bricking itself state by releasing the Elite so let's hope the XBone doesn't have similar issues or we'll be waiting close to a decade for MS to bother fixing the ruddy thing.

 

[DrOswald]

sounds about right; I think most designers whining about not having more power fell into the category of "didn't know how to optimize or be efficient with design." If someone is whining about power more than likely they're trying to disguise their ineptitude and incompetence. Especially when it'd proven ad infinitum that you don't need cutting edge tech to make great games.

Optimizing and being efficient in design cost time and money. All other things equal, more power makes games easier and cheaper to make. That is why designers are constantly harping about more power and why it is a real important and legitimate concern.

Wanting more power is not a sign of ineptitude, it is a sign of not wanting to dick around for 50% of your time with optimization instead of actually making a video game.

 

[chikusho]

sounds about right; I think most designers whining about not having more power fell into the category of "didn't know how to optimize or be efficient with design." If someone is whining about power more than likely they're trying to disguise their ineptitude and incompetence. Especially when it'd proven ad infinitum that you don't need cutting edge tech to make great games.

Optimizing and being efficient in design cost time and money. All other things equal, more power makes games easier and cheaper to make. That is why designers are constantly harping about more power and why it is a real important and legitimate concern.

Wanting more power is not a sign of ineptitude, it is a sign of not wanting to dick around for 50% of your time with optimization instead of actually making a video game.

Well, no. More power makes it necessary for games to use that power, which requires even more optimizing and even more being efficient with design which takes even more time and even more money.

Wanting more power is a sign of placing the emphasis on the wrong thing, technically impressive graphics, rather than trying to move the medium forward.

 

[DrOswald]

sounds about right; I think most designers whining about not having more power fell into the category of "didn't know how to optimize or be efficient with design." If someone is whining about power more than likely they're trying to disguise their ineptitude and incompetence. Especially when it'd proven ad infinitum that you don't need cutting edge tech to make great games.

Optimizing and being efficient in design cost time and money. All other things equal, more power makes games easier and cheaper to make. That is why designers are constantly harping about more power and why it is a real important and legitimate concern.

Wanting more power is not a sign of ineptitude, it is a sign of not wanting to dick around for 50% of your time with optimization instead of actually making a video game.

Well, no. More power makes it necessary for games to use that power, which requires even more optimizing and even more being efficient with design which takes even more time and even more money.

Wanting more power is a sign of placing the emphasis on the wrong thing, technically impressive graphics, rather than trying to move the medium forward.

Just because you have the power does not mean that you must use it and just because you want it does not mean that you are shooting for impressive graphics above all else. This may be the attitude of some AAA developers who are always trying to out do each other in superficial ways, but more power benefits the indie who just wants to design a game even more because he doesn't have to worry about optimization.

A game like Monaco, for example, is much easier to make for more powerful hardware - not because you are pushing the graphics to the limit but because you don't need to worry about optimization at all. You don't have to spend hours refining your pathing to be as efficient as possible or cut corners in ways the player wont see. You don't have to optimize loading times if you can hold the entire game in memory at once.

More power makes developing absolute cutting edge squeeze every last drop out of this processor type programming harder, but every thing else becomes significantly easier. And we are at the point where games don't need to be on the cutting edge.

 

[chikusho]

And we are at the point where games don't need to be on the cutting edge.

And the entire point is that we've been at that point for a long time, and would continue to be at that point without new consoles.

 

[DrOswald]

And we are at the point where games don't need to be on the cutting edge.

And the entire point is that we've been at that point for a long time, and would continue to be at that point without new consoles.

But why would it be better to stay with shitty old hardware that requires optimization for relatively light tasks when new hardware exists? The fact of the matter is that the PS3 and 360 are woefully under powered at this point. What possible advantage do we get from sticking with outdated hardware?

The fact of the matter is that the 360 and the PS3 were not powerful enough to be program and forget machines, not even for very simple games. The Xbone and PS4 are in that territory for games like Super Meat Boy or Castle Crashers.