John Carmack interview talks PS3 & X360

[hey69]

-----------shamelesly copied from somewhere else---------------------------
There's a multiple page interview in the new Game Informer (Crackdown for Xbox360 from the GTA creator is the cover story). They talk about Doom for Mobile, the Doom movie, and more. Here's an excerpt of the interesting stuff...

We'd heard that one of the very first PS3 dev kits showed up at your door. Any truth to that?
Yes, we have PS3 dev kits here.

How are those working out?
The Microsoft dev kits for the Xbox 360 are much nicer. I'll say that. We do intend that on our next project, we are intentionally targeting all three platforms - PC, PS3, and Xbox 360. I've actually just this last week started moving my development focus from the PC to the Xbox 360. Microsoft has done a spectacular job of making that an easy move. You get to use the same tools, the same environment, the debugging is great, and the performance analysis tools are great.

In regards to the PS3 dev kit, has it been a big challenge from a technological standpoint?
It's actually not going to be that bad in the larger scheme of things. If you look at the previous generation, the PS2 was not a good platform for developers to work on. From a hardware standpoint, the PS3 is a lot nicer, because it essentially has a PC graphics accelerator in it and it has simple memory. I think Microsoft made a better choice with the processor technology than Sony did. But, to a first approximation, they are both plenty capable systems. I was much more down on the PS2 than I am on the PS3. I definitely did prefer the Xbox over the PS2 by a wide margin. I think I prefer the 360 over the PS3 by a less wide margin.

What are your thoughts about the potential of these two systems in the overall market?
I don't like how the hype is always so ridiculous at new console launches. Because the truth is, by the time any of these things ship, you will b

e able to buy a higher end PC. It won't have better cost performance - the value won't be as good, but for the people that try to make it sound like the PS3 is going to be an order of magnitude better than anything else, it's just not true.

On the future of Doom:
"It's likely there will be a Doom 4, but id probably won't make it." [said it would be like how Raven is doing ]Quake 4

-----------shamelesly copied from somewhere else-------------------------

 

[Carl B]

Isn't this a couple of months old at this point? Or is this a new interview where he's repeating similar themes?

(A link would have been nice)

 

[hey69]

apparently it comes from the latest magazine. since it's a print, i cant copy paste a real source

 

[Titanio]

Isn't this a couple of months old at this point? Or is this a new interview where he's repeating similar themes?

Column B.

 

[Lysander]

why ps3 beta dev kit looks so big, is there additional cooler in or something

 

[blakjedi]

Interesting that Carmack feels so strongly pro360... To me he's always seemed liek a coder's coder so I woul dthink from a technical challenge/potential standpoint he'd be PS3 all the way... *shrug* Also intersting is the he never really states why from a technical standpoint. What about the x360 CPU does he prefer? Symmetry? VMX units? Cache?

MS needs to help get Carmack's programming innovations out to other devs ASAP.

 

[Carl B]

Well, Carmack's a PC guy, and 360 more closely resembles a PC developing environment than does so the PS3, so it's not surprising he would prefer it. Plus with his propensity to develop in the FPS genre, and 360's demographics lining up with that perfectly, there are any number of reasons for Carmack to prefer 360 to the PS3.

 

[Titanio]

Interesting that Carmack feels so strongly pro360... To me he's always seemed liek a coder's coder so I woul dthink from a technical challenge/potential standpoint he'd be PS3 all the way... *shrug* Also intersting is the he never really states why from a technical standpoint. What about the x360 CPU does he prefer? Symmetry? VMX units? Cache?

See his Quakecon keynote. The last thing he wants is "challenge", at least additional challenge beyond what he's happy to do on PCs. He regards Cell as a pain in the ass to port to, and that it pretty much requires a complete rewrite of code. X360 is not as bad in that regard. It's not about technical merit or potential, just the cost (man-hours and otherwise) to move a PC-centric codebase over to Cell. X360 is a closer model to what he'll be doing anyway for PC, but PS3 is more "out there". He generally also prefers the X360 dev environment (dev tools are an obvious advantage for MS, still, despite Sony's improvements). It should be noted that he himself characterises his complaints as "niggles" however. A lot of people blew his comments completely out of proportion back when they were originally made at Quakecon.

 

[mckmas8808]

Interesting that Carmack feels so strongly pro360... To me he's always seemed liek a coder's coder so I woul dthink from a technical challenge/potential standpoint he'd be PS3 all the way... *shrug* Also intersting is the he never really states why from a technical standpoint. What about the x360 CPU does he prefer? Symmetry? VMX units? Cache?

MS needs to help get Carmack's programming innovations out to other devs ASAP.

Good points blak. I don't understand it either. In this interview you can see the basis coming out in him a little though. I caught you Carmack.

 

[hadareud]

Good points blak. I don't understand it either. In this interview you can see the basis coming out in him a little though. I caught you Carmack.

I don't know why people think that Xbox360 is that close to PC development. Probably closer than PS3, but still quite different I think ...

 

[Titanio]

I don't know why people think that Xbox360 is that close to PC development. Probably closer than PS3, but still quite different I think ...

It is indeed still quite different. Carmack even complained about X360's CPU too! But it's not as different as Cell/PS3. The Crytek guys basically said the same thing - before they got PS3 kits, they thought PS3 and X360 would have similar needs and requirements, but once they got the PS3 kits they realised that PS3 was more different from X360 than X360 even was from PCs.

And the only thing Carmack is biased toward is controlling costs, which is very understandable, particularly for a dev who aims to maintain a low headcount. PS3 is marching out of step, technically, with the other platforms he's working on, and that's not a good thing for them, as it will require more work. For them, PC is the "normal" environment, and everything that diverges from that is extra work. X360 is also a little more work, but not nearly to the extent that PS3 is, for them. That's not universally the case with every, or even most devs, but it is the case with iD, so their opinion is quite understandable.

 

[Dave Glue]

I don't know why people think that Xbox360 is that close to PC development.

Could be he has the development systems and actual experience coding with each?

Just a crazy thought.

Probably closer than PS3, but still quite different I think ...

I'll try and dig up the link, but actually he's not the first developer to imply there's actually less of a gap between PC->Xbox360 than 360->PS3 (Gabe perhaps?).
Edit: Beaten to it.

 

[version]

 

[hadareud]

I'll try and dig up the link, but actually he's not the first developer to imply there's actually less of a gap between PC->Xbox360 than 360->PS3 (Gabe perhaps?).
Edit: Beaten to it.

It was actually that Crytek guy who said it (I remember because I translated the interview). But like Titanio stated it's quite different still.

But I think Carmack is pretty level headed and speaks quite positive about both consoles. I guess I just wanted to point out that it's not like Carmack prefers X360 because it's essentially a PC and he just doesn't like the PS3 because he's a "lazy PC developer" (I know no one said so in this thread, but that's the number one thing that people try to discredit him by).

 

[mckmas8808]

What did you show that for?

 

[expletive]

Interesting that Carmack feels so strongly pro360... To me he's always seemed liek a coder's coder so I woul dthink from a technical challenge/potential standpoint he'd be PS3 all the way... *shrug* Also intersting is the he never really states why from a technical standpoint. What about the x360 CPU does he prefer? Symmetry? VMX units? Cache?

MS needs to help get Carmack's programming innovations out to other devs ASAP.

He made a comment in his quakecon speech that, in terms of multicore programming difficulty, the design of the xenon was the 'best possible scenario'. I think he went on to define that as 3 identical cores that were cache-coherent.

My guess is thats what he means here as well.

J

 

[EndR]

This is also from gameinformer, haven´t seen this posted before, but I found it to be interesting. Kind of OT but interesting..

J Allard said...
"On the CPU architecture, we've built a really high bandwidth access to memory (and decompression technology on the hardware). And a very general, all purpose computer architecture that basically allows you to write your own decompressors to decompress however you want. This is one of the reasons we went to the multi-core architecture and said, "Hey, if you're id or you're Tiburon or you're Rockstar, you can go to build a streaming decompression system that works for your environment, and we'll give you the bandwidth to do it". (Its) a very similar design to the original Xbox or to PC, where its very easy to program to and you use one of those cores and have your Rockstar I/O developer create this streaming system that's totally customized to your needs, because we've got the bandwidth and memory, and you've got the CPU horsepower. We've architectured it in a way were you can go pick up one of those CPUs to do unbelievable decompression, and there's another CPU over there that doesn't affect the game loop."

 

[expletive]

This is also from gameinformer, haven´t seen this posted before, but I found it to be interesting. Kind of OT but interesting..

"On the CPU architecture, we've built a really high bandwidth access to memory (and decompression technology on the hardware). And a very general, all purpose computer architecture that basically allows you to write your own decompressors to decompress however you want. This is one of the reasons we went to the multi-core architecture and said, "Hey, if you're id or you're Tiburon or you're Rockstar, you can go to build a streaming decompression system that works for your environment, and we'll give you the bandwidth to do it". (Its) a very similar design to the original Xbox or to PC, where its very easy to program to and you use one of those cores and have your Rockstar I/O developer create this streaming system that's totally customized to your needs, because we've got the bandwidth and memory, and you've got the CPU horsepower. We've architectured it in a way were you can go pick up one of those CPUs to do unbelievable decompression, and there's another CPU over there that doesn't affect the game loop."

This is referring to what architecture?

J

 

[EndR]

This is referring to what architecture?

J

Sorry...
I will edit the post so it becomes more apparent.. it is J Allard comments so the architecture is 360.

 

[Titanio]

This is referring to what architecture?

It sounds like Xenon, a MS commentary on Xenon. They've spoken before about compression/decompression on the CPU etc. although I didn't know they were talking about assigning a whole core to that.