John Carmack QuakeCon Keynote Speech Recap >

	2006/08/05 20:45:27: Posted by DM
	John Carmack, one of the founders of iD Software, gave his annual keynote address at QuakeCon yesterday. PlanetQuake4 has the recap posted for all of you who could not attend. One of the things Carmack mentioned is that even though iD's next game will be a 3D action game, they are "are branching out into different directions" with the project. This is certainly good to hear. The game will use an advanced version of the MegaTexture technology powering Quake Wars, and we all know how good that looks and sounds (click the news topic for media). >Link
	Labeled With  quake id software Comments [10]  | Rate this article: -- 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10  | Avg. rating of 7.0

Sounds like Mr Carmack and ID is working on a 360 title and it will use a more advanced version of megatexturing *eye opens wide*

# id Software will be focusing on gameplay over graphics in their next unannounced title.

Holy game convention Batman, they're going to try and make a good game?

the use of multi processors and megatexturing are good news in terms of eye candy and performance....

but he gameplay is in first priority.

Nice, another bad port!!!!

If i ever see again shitty graphics and physics like those of Prey then im going to kill mr carmack because he has a big mouth!

Relax don't think Carmack has been sitting on his behind not learning up about the 360. I'm sure he's going to make the 360 really sing.

Summary taken from another forum. *credit to hasan*

hes bringing a brand new IP different from anything Id has ever done before to PC 360 and PS3 simultaneously

360 is the lead console development platform, PS3 is marginally more powerful than 360 but is also marginally more difficult to develop for.

PS3 is much more challenging to code for compared to 360 and PC...parallelism in PS3 is difficult compared to threading and multicore 360 and PCs....360 development is harder than PC due to 6 threads....optimization on parallelism and multicore systems is the key

Exploiting 360 and PS3 is still difficult. Audio coding is much better on consoles than PCs..



advantages PS3 and 360 have over PC is that you are in control of all your threads unlike PC where some if not many threads are dedicated to OS and other processes running on the system, PS3 and 360 being a closed design helps ....

IDs next game will be its first game to make the game faster and better if you have multicore systems like multicore PCs PS3 and 360....



Next Gen multicore systems will give Id a chance to split the logic in a way the game can sense the situation in the game and react to it accordingly...360 have 3 symmetrical processors where anyone of them can run the same code and you can set up pretty nice structures....but PS3 have asynchronous processors or assymmetric processors like the Cell, you need to think more about accelerator engines than processes...so in PS3 you do have 1 thread which goes through and does everything so you can run compression decompression code run well on PS3 but when you look how much faster can a game get you get small percentage numbers of increase compared to PC processors and thats AFTER you restructure things carefully around the Cell...

some ahmadll law is qouted saying even if you have 20% acceleration due to Cell like processors...it will not make the game that much faster..the hardware developers (aimed at IBM) just take thier own kernel and run it saying this and this wll be faster with multicore..multithreaded processors but that will not get the game running faster as it involves many different codes which might turn out to be slower...on next gen consoles you can make small applications whicih can run faster but no difference compared to PCs in game performance

he says what really makes the game go faster is better branch predictions and bigger caches...he think the light is near the end of the tunnel about how much faster the processors can really get



he says the future of processing is parallelism though as the orders of magnitude increase in processing speed will come to an end very soon and an example of parallism is the GPU

He says if Sony had 2 Cells one handling CPU processing and one GPU as they originally intended they would have failed this generation. he says they dodged the bullet on that one.

he says sampling is better than resolution which is too high currently"

This is what I like about Carmack he cuts through all the marketing bs and tells it like it is.



Correction his exact words were HOPEFULLY to 360 and ps3 simultaneously he didn't seem to fully confirm it.

From the sounds of it.. it doesn't sound like the extra spes will even contribute as much to the overall game's speed like people thought (even I thought it would help the overall speed of the game)

It seems it will more be accelerating specific aspects, but it wont necessarily take an entire game with all these special effects and amazing graphics going on and just make it faster as a result of numerous spe accelerated applications running. It can't be seen as processes on the ps3, but as accelerator engines. Basically I think this is 3 timese general purpose processing advantage Microsoft has been talking about surfacing as the 3 cores aren't seen as accelerator engines, but more as processes and thanks to all 3 being identical and capable of running the same code this is a processor that can really take an entire game and speed it up.

Especially with Carmack putting so much emphasis on parallelism as the way forward for the cpus on these consoles and that is far easier to obtain on the 360.

I don't think it would be out of line to say he's suggesting the 360 is the console with the most potential moving forward based on his emphasis on parallelism and the fact that all 3 360 cores are all capable of running the exact same code. He basically drove home in his keynote the reasons why he feels Microsoft made a better choice with the cpu inside the 360.

He's also saying don't trust IBM's benchmark results because they purposely setup the best case scenario for their performances analysis of the cpus and the impressive results they show aren't even reasons for why a game ends up not being fast so its ultimately useless. So having these impressive numbers here make no serious improvement to the game one way or the other. Video game development is hardly ever the best case scenario for a specific cpus strengths. They'll of course try their best to get the most impressive results, but he's saying they'll never achieve what those IBM setup results show.

He exact words in the quakecon keynote was "it winds up accelerating a few small applications, but has utterly negligible impact on the game performance"

As a matter of fact its best I don't assume what he meant, but thats what it sounded like he was saying.

Response to optaviusx:

What you said is a nice summary. I like it that Carmack takes the time to point out that the Xbox 360 is his primary development platform. I also think it is cool that Carmack supports the idea of bringing Xbox Live to more PC games, like Shadowrun.

The programmers and id software have said many times that in terms of what can be considered "Computer Processing Power," the PS3 is marginally (which means slightly) more powerful than the 360...but they always make sure to go on and talk about how the Xbox 360 offers significantly greater processing efficiency and power effectiveness in terms of "Videogame Processing Power" such as "cache size," which is one of the many areas where the performance of the Xbox 360 is far greater than the PS3 in ways that can be applied to videogame graphics.

The cool thing about Carmack and his staff is the way that they look at things and explain them from the point of view of the developer. They are not afraid to explain what the numbers really mean. I particularly like the way Carmack talks about how "Computer Processing Numbers" on IBMs Cell chip are something that may look good on paper, but are not nearly as impressive in videogames, because that type of "Computer Processing Power" cannot be applied to videogame graphics.

I have always heard people talk about how the Playstation 3 would be the most powerful if we were playing Spreadsheets and Accounting software, because it could use that "Computer Processing Power" that relates to Floating Point math calculations for those purposes. But, Sony was so interested in saying that the Playstation 3 is a "Computer Entertainment System" rather than a "Videogame System," they ended up making a system that developers don't like to make games on, which is probably one of the reasons why the Playstation 3 ended up with what TIME magazine calls "lame videogames."

I also found out in TIME magazine that the Cell CPU in the PS3 is definitely VERY overrated!!! That is probably why the PS3, and the Cell CPU used in it, were called the Biggest Disappointment of the Year by TIME Magazine. In another issue of TIME magazine, it says that it takes of LOT of those CPUs working together to be effective in the ways that Sony tried to say when they were telling all their lies! Let me explain:

Sony often says things like, "Our Playstation 3 uses the Cell CPU, which is used in IBMs supercomputer that is the most powerful supercomputer in the world."

The MAJOR problem with that statement is the fact that there are over 16,000 Cell CPUs found in that IBM supercomputer! Sony doesn't bother to point that out!

But I like the way that Carmack talks about how we are dealing with Videogames, which require a different kind of power and performance than Computers do. I like the way he explains how we are dealing with things like texture quality, and shading quality...and those are areas where the Xbox 360's GPU offers far greater performance than any other console.

I think that is why Carmack makes it so clear that the Xbox 360 is his favorite console to develop games for.

Based on what I read, I think Carmack should maybe take some advice from the people at Ubisoft or Tecmo when it comes to developing games for the Xbox 360, or studying how to apply the multi-core power that uses different threads.

The people at both Ubisoft and Tecmo made it clear that they now plan on using one of the three Xbox 360 CPU's entirely for artificial intelligence and physics. The other two CPUs leave four available threads to work with the needs of both the CPU and GPU! That method of doing things actually fills in the blank spot of Carmacks statement about "maximum efficiency" because Ubisoft and Tecmo said they were thrilled to have such a high level of performance!

During interviews, Ubisoft and Tecmo pointed out that the pre-alpha development kits that games like Dead or Alive 4 used only allowed the developers to access ONE of the three CPUs and they could only use ONE of the six threads!!! So, from their point of view, they must feel like they are in heaven in terms of how much General Purpose CPU processing power the final development kits for the Xbox 360 now offer developers since they were released in the summer of 2006.

The thing that is cool with John Carmack is that he takes newer things into considerations. Now that the Xbox 360 and PS3 development kits are finished, he is more open about the things that he discusses.

The way that John Carmack talks about the superior performance and power that can be obtained with Xbox 360 videogames due to the fact that the Xbox 360 is so much easier for developers to work with is also a very cool thing, because it shows that John Carmack isn't afraid to state the truth.

I can't wait to play Return to Castle Wolfenstein on the Xbox 360, and I am SO HAPPY that Carmack once again confirms that the Xbox 360 is his primary development platform.

It makes me VERY HAPPY to hear that John Carmack believes that the Xbox 360 offers the greatest performance with graphics and gameplay not only in the short-term, but also in the long-term. This confirms what I have thought all along.

The PS3 launch games had access to final development kits for 6 months, while the Xbox 360 launch games only had access to pre-alpha launch kits that only gave developers access to one-sixth of the General Purpose CPU power. PS3 launch games had access to 100% of the CPU power, and they still were very not impressive.

I was 99% confident that this was a VERY STRONG indication that the Playstation 3 would not see a big improvement in coming generations in the way that the Xbox 360 saw such a big improvement from generation one to generation two.

Now that we have even more confirmation from a legendary programmer like John Carmack, I am even more confident that the Xbox 360 software will continue to outperform the Playstation 3 each generation...and I agree that the performance gap will likely increase each generation, in favor of the Xbox 360 superiority!!!