Carmack: Rage runs faster on Xbox 360

[WereKitten]

HappySqurriel said:

RAZurrection said:

Darc Requiem said:
My best friend pointed out something that I think has been missed. Carmack prefers OpenGL. He doesn't use Direct X. If anything, you'd think he would have an easier time getting an engine running well on PS3. I'm sure the gap will close by the time the game is released.

Jons primary preference of OpenGL over DirectX is because it's free which is fine, but he's also acknowledged that Microsoft created the best development environment he's ever seen in the Xbox 360, maybe he'd sing a different tune if DirectX was as open source as GL, but it's not.

I thought his preference of OpenGL died after the Quake 3 engine primarily because the feature set of OpenGL didn't evolve as quickly as DirectX and DirectX was more of a full featured API while OpenGL was primarily a 3D graphics API? Beyond that, I thought he really disliked how low performance Direct3D was in DirectX 7, but that he was happier with DirectX 8 and 9 because they made huge leaps in improving overal performance of the API?

 

Doom 3 / Quake Wars used Id's tech 4 which was still OpenGL based. Tech 5 will have both backends available, apparently, and I remeber Carmack saying in an interview that the actual library used is little more than an implementation detail, easily pluggable. I suppose that the real wizardry in tech 5 happens somewhere else, because I have no idea how the megatexture thing is supposed to work.

And @RAZurrection:

OpenGL is no more "open source" than DirectX, because there's no such thing as "the OpenGL code". OpenGL is a specification, of which many implementations exist. Some are purely software (like the Mesa library), others use hardware acceleration, like any nVidia/ATI drivers. In the same way the DirectX specifications must be implemented by the GPU drivers, or a software layer can even convert DirectX calls to OpenGL calls like in WINE.

Carmack's distaste for Direct3D in the past came simply from the fact that it used to be a horrible API, while OpenGL was always lauded for its clarity and coherence. Sadly, OpenGL got more garbled with time while Direct3D improved.