Carmack's Hands On Impressions of Xbox 360 & PS3

Hardknock

Veteran
http://www.gameinformer.com/News/Story/200708/N07.0803.1731.12214.htm?Page=1

Game Informer: When we interviewed you at CES this year, and QuakeCon two years ago you weren’t too thrilled with developing for multicore systems. Obviously now, that’s the case across all platforms. Were you kind of at the point with id Tech 5 where, you said, “We give in?â€￾

John Carmack: You have to take advantage of what’s on the table. Although it’s interesting that almost all of the PS3 launch titles hardly used any Cells at all. We hired one of the best PS3 guys around who did the Edge Acceleration technology for Sony – he’s on our team now so we’ve got some of the best PS3 experience here. In fact when we were doing all of the tech demos, we’d bring in the developers and they’d walk over and say, “it’s running on the PS3!â€￾ (laughs) They’d sit there and stare at it for a while.

There’s no doubt that with all of the platforms that we have running here PS3 is the most challenging to develop on. That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not that it was a boneheaded decision because they’re a lot closer the fact that they can run like this [points to the 4 different gaming stations running Rage] – they’re a lot closer than they’ve ever been before. It’s a hell of a lot better than PS2 versus Xbox. But given the choice, we’d rather develop on the Xbox 360. The PS3 still does have in theory more power that could be extracted but it’s not smart. We don’t feel it’s smart to head down that rat hole. In fact, the biggest thing we worry about right now is memory. Microsoft extracts 32 megs for their system stuff and Sony takes 96. That’s a big deal because the PS3 is already partitioned memory where the 360 is 512 megs of unified and on the PS3 is 256 of video, 256 of memory minus 96 for their system…stuff. Stuff is not the first thing that came to my mind there. (laughs)

The PS3 is not the favorite platform but it’s going to run the game just as good. To some degree there’s going to be some lowest common denominator effect because we’re going to be testing these every day on all of the platforms, and it’s going to be “Dammit it’s out of memory on the PS3 again, go crunch some things downâ€￾ That’s probably going to be the sore spot for all of this but because we’re continuous builds on all of these we’re going to be fighting these battles as we go rather than build these things out and go, “Oh my God we’re so far away from running on there.â€￾ Which is the situation where Enemy Territory is suffering with at a degree right now, and a lot of other people have that.
 
We hired one of the best PS3 guys around who did the Edge Acceleration technology for Sony

Does anyone know who they hired ?

In fact when we were doing all of the tech demos, we’d bring in the developers and they’d walk over and say, “it’s running on the PS3!” (laughs) They’d sit there and stare at it for a while.

:LOL:

The PS3 still does have in theory more power that could be extracted but it’s not smart. We don’t feel it’s smart to head down that rat hole.

Ok, that's where things become even more interesting -- Some bonus effort needed from the devs for game-specific features (Anymore people like nAo and DeanoC out there ?).

Microsoft extracts 32 megs for their system stuff and Sony takes 96. That’s a big deal because the PS3 is already partitioned memory where the 360 is 512 megs of unified and on the PS3 is 256 of video, 256 of memory minus 96 for their system…stuff. Stuff is not the first thing that came to my mind there. (laughs)

The PS3 is not the favorite platform but it’s going to run the game just as good. To some degree there’s going to be some lowest common denominator effect because we’re going to be testing these every day on all of the platforms, and it’s going to be “Dammit it’s out of memory on the PS3 again, go crunch some things down”

Amen ! I still wonder what goes into the 96Mb. Sure hope it's something useful.
 
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So it's just the main RAM that is too small on the PS3 due to 96 OS reservations?

1: Q: If Rage will ship on 2 DVDs, how will that work for multi-console?

A: The source data is more than that even. We go through tons of data compression, so the game is segmented in that regard. I wouldn't expect an HD DVD release for Rage though. What's interesting though is that it all fits fine with a 256m video card. On PS3, video requirements doesn't even completely use the 256 video memory; we wish we could use more in other places. Bottom line, it can be compressed from source.
 
So it's just the main RAM that is too small on the PS3 due to 96 OS reservations?

I dont get what he is saying there. He says that 256MB are enough, but you cant use all the memory available on the PS3's video memory?

So some MB are sitting there idle?

Why?
 
..and the "crunching things down" is where I have a problem (not with carmack personally, love the guy, but the industry in general).

It has to be done, and it's usually what they do in the industry, but I can't help but not like it anyway. You have a game that you're developping that will come out on two consoles. Unfortunatelly, you need to make it run first and foremost on the one with the least memory, and second on the one with the most. One could argue that we can just branch off textures so that they are higher-res ones on one console, but in reality, we don't always get the chance (time constraints, risk assesments, overall complexity of the project, lack of fully planning ahead). So by the time the game ships, it may look awesome!................ but it looks almost the same on both consoles, when it could of had much sharper textures on one of them.

I really hope a lot of production houses will stop the whole rushing-things-out-the-door part, and allow something like three months extra time. I doubt that will happen though, because the christmas season (huge percentage of sales) coems exactly every 12 months.
 
There's reserved RAM, something like 32MB IIRC. For the OS. So yes, it's sitting there idle doing absolutely nothing. It probably gets used when using remote play on your PSP, as a buffer for scaling of images to be beamed to PSP. Maybe.
 
There's reserved RAM, something like 32MB IIRC. For the OS. So yes, it's sitting there idle doing absolutely nothing. It probably gets used when using remote play on your PSP, as a buffer for scaling of images to be beamed to PSP. Maybe.
You mean that part of the 96MB of memory reserved for the OS, 32MB come from the VRAM?
 
His engine is running on all four platforms, with identical looks and at 60fps, using the same art assets. It also happens to be quite impressive.

I think the man more than deserves the right to whine about any platform related issues he wants to.
 
More PS3 whinning from Carmack as we used to...

Well, let's see:

- The game supposedly looks the same on all platforms.

- Having hired one of the Edge tool developers Carmack admits the PS3 engine should run as well if not better than other versions (even if it was a PITA to get it to that point)

- His game and technology is almost a poster child for one of the more controversial technology choices Sony made with PS3

.. in other words, I don't think there's too much for PS3 owners to complain about here.
 
I think his MS bias blinds people to what he is saying.

Everything he does say positive about the PS3, does come with negatives shortly after though so it's understandable.
 
I think his MS bias blinds people to what he is saying.

Everything he does say positive about the PS3, does come with negatives shortly after though so it's understandable.

How is he biased towards Microsoft ?
For example, when was the last time he used DirectX in id's engines ?
Or had a game that didn't end up ported to Linux or Mac OS X due to some exclusivity deal with MS ? ;)

I think he's just baffled by the fact that the PS3 doesn't have that unified memory pool and similar PPC ISA cores in CELL's die -as opposed to having 8 cores and two different ISA's-.
However, the fact that the PS3 uses a -partially- PPC ISA, Linux and OpenGL right from the get go sure is a lot better than the old days.

Note that i have both the X360 and a PS3, so don't call me biased.
Wi(i)ll get a Nintendo... as soon as i can find one. ;)
 
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He is biased towards 360 because it's easier to develop for.

Also, there is no criticism of the 360 in any of the comments posted above (whether that is due to the quote selected by the original poster or not I don't know)

Maybe there is more when he highlights limitations of 360, but I doubt it.
 
He is biased towards 360 because it's easier to develop for.

Sounds wise enough
Also, there is no criticism of the 360 in any of the comments posted above (whether that is due to the quote selected by the original poster or not I don't know)

People don't tend to talk in that way though, constantly thinking "Hmm, I said something about the PS3, so now I must say something about the 360, and then the Mac and then..." - brains don't work like that. In his experience the PS3 is the thing holding his game development back, so of course he's going to be negative about it. I applaud his honesty, but not the message. I'd much rather have the consoles duking it out evenly than having one getting slated by a well respected developer.

Maybe there is more when he highlights limitations of 360, but I doubt it.

To quote The Dude - "Well, that's like.. your opinion, man."
 
Cause they do, it was only a few weeks ago Rockstar were going on about something similar.

He doesn't want to talk about any limitations the 360 has, as it's his favoured console.

No problem there for me as his games will all look the same no matter which console they are on, whether its the PS3 holding it back or the 360, but to suggest he doesn't favour the 360 is wrong in just about every way imaginable.
 
Cause they do, it was only a few weeks ago Rockstar were going on about something similar.

He doesn't want to talk about any limitations the 360 has, as it's his favoured console.

No problem there for me as his games will all look the same no matter which console they are on, whether its the PS3 holding it back or the 360, but to suggest he doesn't favour the 360 is wrong in just about every way imaginable.

It's his favoured console to develop on. If he was having any major problems with 360 he would have mentioned them.
 
He doesn't want to talk about any limitations the 360 has, as it's his favoured console.

No problem there for me as his games will all look the same no matter which console they are on, whether its the PS3 holding it back or the 360, but to suggest he doesn't favour the 360 is wrong in just about every way imaginable.
You're mistaking his development preferences for fanboy allegiances.

The only thing really new here is how much effort they're putting into getting the PS3 version on-par with the rest of the systems. And both console owners should be happy they're doing as much as they are to match the PC version.
 
On the memory thing, this has been discussed forever; numerous threads on the subject.

It's 32MB of GDDR3, and down to ~52MB of the XDR. The XDR set-aside has come down since launch, which is what the 96MB (32+64) figure would refer to. Carmack's not speaking in exact terms there.

(yes, I posted this in the other thread also)

Speaking of which, this is the tech section, so let's try to keep the console grudge match out of it (which means dropping discussion of Carmack's supposed allegiances); what should be discussed here, is the engine itself. As mentioned there's another thread on the topic in the regular console section available for freer discussion.
 
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