Carmack: Rage runs faster on Xbox 360

[WereKitten]

Reasonable said:

Interesting. Particularly as initially id made a lot of noise about Tech 5 was designed to be equivalent across all platforms - now, it seems it's design is better suited to PC/360 after all.

This may not be a surprise, given id's PC background, but I'm more than a little surprised that Carmack, who I've always held in high esteem as a coder and engine developer, seems unable to match developers like IW, whose engine runs 60fps on both 360 and PS3 and looks pretty much the same on both too.

I was hoping Tech 5 really would be the first heavy duty engine from one of the former big PC developers to run well across both platforms, but with Unreal tech now performing well on PS3 and with a new Crytek engine on the way for HD consoles it looks like id might have failed to equal the competition in the engine stakes.

Nice for 360 owners I guess. If this holds true at launch then its PC for me.

 

EDIT: where did the 4 disk thing come from?  I thought it was 2 DVDs - maybe 3 at the outside?

Some of the choices they made in the initial design of their engine could be holding them back on the PS3 because of memory constraints, the way they multithread or some other issue that differentiate the PS3 from the PC architecture, whereas IW's engine is probably technically less ambitious. Crytek could end up eating their lunch, though.

Anyway, I read his words more as "we're not still there on the PS3" rather than "this is everything we'll get out of it". After all his exact words are that the RSX is a little slower and they have more difficulty in splitting up the work among the cores. That doesn't sound like something that could translate into a degradation from 60 to 20-30 fps, unless his words about their difficulties are a lesson in understatement :)