S.T.A.G.E. said:
Thats perfectly fine. let me know more, but the real issue of backlash is coming from the PC gamers, not the console gamers. Carmack is getting backhanded by all of them for not making the game up to par and now Carmack has stated that the consoles don't run with not even 1/10 of a PC's power. He's blaming the PS3 for his troubles when the PS3 owners are not the ones who are complaining. He's also stated that PC is no longer the lead platform and games are made in mind where the larger paying audience is. This is fine....but its not like they wont rip his game for fun out of spite. |
And I agree that id screwed up on the PC version, and they really should have given it some more attention. Not because they need to use the PC better, but because they need to let the players have the freedom to utilize their systems the way they want. Not to mention having everything work.
What makes RAGE special compared to every other game is how it uses textures. id calls it virtualized texturing, where everything in the world is hand built, and you don't have textures that are used twice. Basically, id have created these massive textures (the technique is also called mega textures), where they have parts of these textures loaded in as needed. This means they can have a bunch of detail in the world with less RAM usage than what is usually required.
However, consoles are still very limited in RAM (PS3 slightly more so than the 360), so a lot of these texture bits have to be loaded in from the harddrive or the game disc very often (that's what Carmack means by IO. IO is input/output and refers to loading something into the RAM from some media like an optical disc). Loading from an optical disc is really slow though, and while loading from a harddrive is faster, it's still quite slow relative to the rest of the system.
Because the blu-ray drive in the PS3 is even slower than the 360's DVD drive, RAGE has to put 8 GB of data on the harddrive in order to keep down the pop-in to a tolerable level. The 360 without a harddrive install will run about the same as the PS3 version (in terms of pop-in), but because the 360 allows all the data to be installed to harddrive, the pop-in is notably reduced when you do.
That's what Carmack is referring to. The PS3 is slower to load things in, and it has less available RAM to utilize.
