John Carmack may have left id to join the team making the Ocuclus Rift full time but he still has plenty to say on the console market, both the previous generation and the hot new PS4 and Xbox One. Whilst one might think Carmack might be the type of guy to always be pushing for newer hardware, he feels that the power of the previous consoles weren't full utilized.

"There's so much you can still do on the previous console generation," Carmack said. "The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world's gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things." It does surprise me to think that those consoles weren't straining towards the end of their long lifecycles but Carmack seems to feel that you can only really move on from a generation once you've full mastered the previous one.

One thing Carmack wasn't fond of during the last generation of consoles was the long development cycles and id's perfectionism which led to the studio only shipping two big games in the generation. "...we fell into was the longer and longer times between releases," John concludes. "If I could go back in time and change one thing along the trajectory of id Software, it would be, do more things more often."

Considering id's last two games were Quake IV and RAGE, it would have been interesting to see if id could have made smaller, download-only games as a way to test its technology whilst still being in the habit of putting out releases. 

John Carmack laments next-gen push [GamesIndustry International]

http://www.destructoid.com/john-carmack-360-and-ps3-were-far-from-tapped-out--267340.phtml

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Personally, I disagree.

Year after year we saw small visual improvments. It certainly felt like the potential of those consoles were tapped.

At launch the 8th gen hardware has already shown significant visual improvments that 7th gen consoles simply can't duplicate. I hope developers continue to make 7th gen games for a few years, but I'm glad to see developers now focusing on more powerful hardware.

Tapped out ? I think John carmack is getting a little over obsessed. In the console space the term "optimization" means to dumb down.

Good to know. I had similar sentiment. So, i am going to stick with PS3 till 2015. I mean they can play Destiny, Titanfall and Watchdogs. The biggest new ip's from third parties.

Yeah, yeah and Xbone and PS4 have very similar performance, thanks for your insight John!

This. 

this guy is weird... keeps on making statements awkward statements that frankly, no one cares about. So what if last generation wasn't "tapped out"?

What was his last statement again? Ps4 and Xb1 are about the same in power, before the consoles were even released.

I actually start to see a pattern here, he makes awkward statements that can't be proven right or wrong.

Now that everyone has their PS4's and XBONES...it's fun to shit on poor PS360. Even classic wizz is joining in the mockery of classic console by making fun of a rocket scientist.

Stay classy wizz.

Nonsense.
With nearly a decade of work, billions of dollars in investment, and devs like Sony Santa Monica, Naughty Dog, and 343i, PS3 and 360 have been bled dry.

He's half right,

Well. He is probably completely right, this guy is far from a village idiot, he knows his stuff, I doubt anyone on this forum is as smart as he is when it comes to video game engine technology.
The work he did on game engines well over a decade ago is still going to be powering and thus influencing Next Generation games, like Call of Duty and Titanfall (Uses the Source Engine which stems from Quake.)

There are many rendering techniques which we hadn't seen used last generation, both for improved performance and/or image quality.