Industry legend and co-founder of id Software, John Carmack recently discussed his thoughts on the next generation of gaming and how he’s “not all that excited about” what the next wave of technology will bring.
According to Carmack, gamers won’t be seeing the revolutionary jump in visuals and game design that they may be anticipating, claiming that the next generation will basically “let us do everything we want to do now, with the knobs turned up.” Carmack went on to provide an example of exactly what that may look like, saying:
If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you’ve sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation.
It will be what we already have, but a lot better. You will be able to redesign with a focus on D11, but it will not really change anyone’s world. It will look a lot better, it will move towards the movie rendering experience and that is better and better, but it’s not like the first time you’ve ever played an FPS.
He also went on to point out that the battle for power between Microsoft and Sony will likely rage on in the coming years, noting that at the end of the day it’s not about processing power but rather experience, citing Nintendo and the Wii as a primary example.
Sony and Microsoft are going to fight over gigaflops and teraflops and GPUs and all this. In the end, it won’t make that much difference. When you get to this, it makes a really big difference in the experience.
Nintendo went and brought motion into the gaming sphere and while only having a tenth of the processing power was able to outsell all of them in all of these ways. I think someone has an opportunity to do this here. It takes a whole ecosystem though, but it is almost perfect.
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