John Carmack on PS3 Video

alex2792 said:
No offense to nAo but I'm gonna guess that John Carmack forgot more about programming than he'll ever know. On the sidenote I really don't understand why everyone thinks that cell is so revolutionary when all the evidence is pointing towards it not being a great gaming CPU. Xbox had like 5x theoretical power of PS2 did the games look THAT much better?

The point was I would love to hear a conversation between Carmack and a PS3 "only" developer. Carmack is not god and I'm sure an exclusive PS3 dev could explain a few things to him about the Cell.

Remember Carmack did call Cell a mistake. Say something like that to a programming team like Naughty Dog that made games on the PS2 and they will probably laugh in your face.
 
mckmas8808 said:
The point was I would love to hear a conversation between Carmack and a PS3 "only" developer. Carmack is not god and I'm sure an exclusive PS3 dev could explain a few things to him about the Cell.

Remember Carmack did call Cell a mistake. Say something like that to a programming team like Naughty Dog that made games on the PS2 and they will probably laugh in your face.

So how many PS3 games has naughty dogs released so far? Did they get good reviews, how where the graphics? Who cares what they did on the PS2, its a completely different architecture! Why doesn't Kutaragi go talk to Bungie, they'll explain a few things about xenon to him while laughing in his face about the 2x power crap. What point are you trying to make here lol.
 
mckmas8808 said:
I'm wondering that too. I wonder what a conversation would be like between John Carmack and nAo?:smile:
Could be interesting, yeah. :smile:

I know ID anounced last year on Quakecon august 2005 that they were working on a secret project scheduled for 360, PS3 and PC, to be released simultaneously. And also remember that they got some Sony PS3 hardware to play around with just recently back then, but I doubt Carmack is really working fulltime on both.

I got the feeling he is focussing on PC and 360, especially since he's been talking so much about 360 in the interviews (the stuff I posted above about him tackling the 360 game-engine in his next game). Also mind that he's not exactly first-party, so there is a big chance several internal Sony studio's will equal or surpass his work easily because they just get more support and work together, possibly even sharing libraries/compilers/algoritms or whatever optimised code is released internally to share between eachother.

Remember the brilliant stream-technology Naughty Dog came up with in the JAk series (which was a whole lot better than GTA's'Renderware streaming technlique), that suddenly was to be found in several other games when they got first party.
 
alex2792 said:
On the sidenote I really don't understand why everyone thinks that cell is so revolutionary when all the evidence is pointing towards it not being a great gaming CPU.

Why is Cell "not a great gaming CPU?". Can some one here elaborate more on this?

I'm just curious
 
From the interviews, I'm getting the impression that Carmack isn't doing all that much hands on stuff anymore, but rather works on core technologies (like solving details of his infinite texture concept), mostly on PC, which is then worked out by the several teams of youngsters under his command. Id software does not have any sort of reputation on console hardware at all, really - they've so far never been a match for Halo or even Socom.

Apart from that, I think he's wrong on several accounts. First of all, he doesn't take the lifespan of consoles into consideration. The benefit of a console is that games get better over time, because the improvements come from better use of hardware and related technologies, not from hardware upgrades. JC's comment suggests he believes that console games require mostly generic routines in high-level programming languages. But Sony has proven before that if you give developers a chance to distinguish themselves by making the most of low-level programming, they will. And by now, developers have learnt this and make sure that they get the low-level stuff down from day one. Publishers like EA have two teams, one working on developing a generic engine for the 360, and the other for the PS3. While the developers who don't want to invest in too low-level programming can make use of extensive middle-ware programs, up-to complete integrated solutions like EPIC's Unreal Engine. But thosee middle-ware programs are able to make the most of the platform specific features.

JC does however recognise the higher peak power of the PS3, and does to some extent see that Sony can probably get away with it because of its market position. Though he still says it is a mistake, he does probably start to understand the console platform better. I personally think that the PS3s success is almost guaranteed because developers have taken the stance that they will have to take full advantage of the PS3 to compete, so they are making big investments right now and they will pay off both in terms of software sales and PS3 adoption rate.

But most of all, I think his comments are given a lot more attention than they deserve. Something which I'm personally guilty of. Comments from developers actually working with the hardware are and have always been more interesting.
 
alex2792 said:
No offense to nAo but I'm gonna guess that John Carmack forgot more about programming than he'll ever know. On the sidenote I really don't understand why everyone thinks that cell is so revolutionary when all the evidence is pointing towards it not being a great gaming CPU. Xbox had like 5x theoretical power of PS2 did the games look THAT much better?

5x theoretical what? The cpu had less flops, the GPU had less fillerate (and maybe less polys as well), and the combined shading power in the ps2 may have also beat xbox out (counting fixed function).
And depending on how the resources were used, sometimes Xbox games could look 5x better than a PS2 game, say if you compared launch titles to launch titles.
 
Fox5 said:
5x theoretical what? The cpu had less flops, the GPU had less fillerate (and maybe less polys as well), and the combined shading power in the ps2 may have also beat xbox out (counting fixed function).
And depending on how the resources were used, sometimes Xbox games could look 5x better than a PS2 game, say if you compared launch titles to launch titles.

MS showed slides with the we have more flops blah blah blah garbage and "theoretically" xbox had something like 5x or probably even more flops.
 
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