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Forums - Gaming - id's Carmack: iPhone nearly as powerful as Xbox, PS2

NJ5 on 03 August 2008

The fact that he says "Xbox, PS2" must mean he's talking in quite broad terms, since we know that the Xbox is significantly more powerful than the PS2.

I guess what he means is the iPhone is graphically almost as powerful as the consoles of last generation, for which it only needs to be almost half as powerful since it has half the resolution.

This would mean it can produce graphics of comparable (but inferior) quality, with the limitation of lower resolution.

 



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321tttrini4everz on 03 August 2008

big hype behind the iphone....i could see it dying soon(in gaming)



selnor on 03 August 2008
exindguy said:
I might point out that Carmack has little (any?) hands-on experience with the PS2 or Xbox, so I'd take his comments with a grain of salt, especially any claims about the relative power of each of these machines versus the iPhone--it's not as if he can simply look at the hardware and instantly calculate its relative horsepower (as some on this thread seem to imply) and is probably basing his comments on what he's been told or read, rather than what he has actually experienced by briging his coding superpowers to bear to squeeze the most possible from the machine in question (in other words, if he isn't building his engines from the ground-up to work on a particular piece of hardware, there is almost always going to be waste and inefficiency when porting that engine around to a host of platforms).

It's also worth pointing out that he's been neck-deep in x86 CPUs for nigh-on two decades, so when he comments on ease of use and horsepower of console x versus console y, you have to at least admit that he might be somewhat biased towards those devices/machines/OSes that he is most familiar (this only stands to reason), so a machine like the PS2 (or PS3) would be relatively alien to his experience since he never really spent any time trying to get much out of them. Meanwhile, over on the 360/iPhone side, he's used to the tools or the hardware or the OS (or all of the above).

This, of course, isn't to say he couldn't. I'm certain that if he sat down and spent a year working solely on the Cell architecture we might all be blown away. But he doesn't and he won't because that's not where the money is as far as id is concerned: the money is on PC, 360 and, apparently, iPhone (and a lot of work for both the PC and 360 is very portable with little waste when transitioning engine work to and fro--the same might very well be the case with the iPhone).

Also, by way of an analogy vis-a-vis Carmack's statements on relative console power levels and their general value in the debate: It's a lot like a fantastic athlete in football that thinks he also knows all there is to know about playing soccer when he hasn't spent very much time actually playing it. Sure, some of the knowledge between games is transferable, but the nitty-gritty, the essentials, might not be quite so easy to grasp without a lot more hands-on time learning the ins and outs, the nuances, of the less-familiar game. This superficial handle on things, however, is enough to convince the average layman that, hell yeah, this guy knows everything there is to know about soccer, even if, at heart, he's really only a great football player and athlete but not neccesarily a great soccer player.

Also there's the question of what his criteria is for making such statements: does he mean it's more powerful because it has more RAM? Is it because the development environment is much easier (believable since it's been years since the Xbox or PS2 were in vogue and the iPhone is, of course, bound to have better--or at least much newer--tools)? Could it be that it's a tactical business decision and that since id is investing substantial resources (read: money) in the platform, it helps if he talks it up to get people to pay attention? It could be all of the above, none of the above, or a mixture (or something else entirely). The point is, do we even know what the context is for his statement(s)? After all, the Sega Saturn had more powerful hardware than the PS One, but getting to it required such a massive amount of work that it wasn't worth the investment to struggle with its idiosyncracies.

Another thing: a lot of you need to really stop with the "he's a god, he knows all, if you question him you will burn!" nonsense because nobody is perfect/right all the time, regardless of how skilled they are at a given craft/trade/profession/etc. Even Einstein made massive, massive fuck-ups in his career and he was one of the most brilliant men to in human history so it might just be possible that the All Seeing Eye, err, Carmack might not always be right just because he's John Carmack.

 

2 points to say.

1. He niether works for Sony, M$, Nintendo or Apple.

2. Ive never, repeat never seen him be wrong about any hardware or tech. You think a man with his knowledge and skill would make a comment without knowing the hardware? You think if you know that more ram doesnt equal better graphics that he wouldnt know this?

As mentioned before John Carmack is the only man in the industry I trus 100% when he says anything about any of the hardware or capabilities of a machine. Period.

The screenshots of his new engine look hands down unbelievable, especially if thats ingame scenario.



darklich13 on 03 August 2008
rocketpig said:
NJ5 said:
If the iPhone becomes big in terms of games, at least Apple fanboys will finally have games to play.

Shut up, Photoshop is loads of fun to play. It's been my most-played game for years now.

 

Yea, Photoshop has amazing graphics.

 



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dib8rman on 03 August 2008

He's a technologist not a game developer - I see this as a major move though.. if he can make high end fps's on the iphone and bring the cost down, I mean stuff that makes gears of war look like the norm on an iphone then it may finally get rid of the poor pc graphic whore gamers that migrated to consoles during the Xbox entry. hip-hip hurrah!



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Million on 03 August 2008

the Iphone can be as powerfull as a PS3 & XBOX 360 combined I still wouldn't give a crap . As far as i'm concerned the control limitations on the Iphone mean it's still more useless than an SNES to me.

I'd take a dual shock over iphone gameplay any day.

The iphone is like a lawn mower with a BMW engine inside.




cAPSLOCK on 03 August 2008
kingofwale said:
the guy is slowly becoming the biggest idiot in gaming

 

My mind is officially blown.



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ssj12 on 03 August 2008

John Carmack is definitely one of the world greatest game designers. They are the only company that made a full ray-tracing version of their game just for Intel to demo their CPUs.

He might be an idiot in terms of change in technology, ie his hatred for multi-core processors, but he does figure out what he is doing with all released technologies. I wouldn't be shocked if he could figure out how to get Crysis to run on the iphone.



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NJ5 on 03 August 2008

@ssj12: I've never seen Carmack hate on multi-core processors. Here is what he said at QuakeCon 2005:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8665

Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable. Carmack cited his Quake III Arena engine, whose renderer was multithreaded and achieved up to 40% performance increases on multiprocessor systems, as a good example of where games would have to go. (Q3A's SMP mode was notoriously crash-prone and fragile, working only with certain graphics driver revisions and the like.) Initial returns on multithreading, he projected, will be disappointing.

Part of the problem with multithreading, argued Carmack, is knowing how to use the power of additional CPU cores to enhance the game experience. A.I., can be effective when very simple, as some of the first Doom logic was. It was less than a page of code, but players ascribed complex behaviors and motivations to the bad guys. However, more complex A.I. seems hard to improve to the point where it really changes the game. More physics detail, meanwhile, threatens to make games too fragile as interactions in the game world become more complex.


Seems to me like he's just saying that multithreading would take time to take off... he was right.

He also expressed a lot of skepticism about physics acceleration cards, and once again he was right. It seems that his doubts about new technology are often correct.

 



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ssj12 on 03 August 2008
NJ5 said:

@ssj12: I've never seen Carmack hate on multi-core processors. Here is what he said at QuakeCon 2005:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/8665

Carmack was less pleased with the PowerPC processors for the new consoles, questioning the choice of an in-order CPU architecture. He estimated the console CPUs' performance at about 50% that of a modern x86 processor and expressed skepticism about the returns of multi-core designs and multithreaded software, especially in the short term. Graphics accelerators are a great example of parallelism working well, he noted, but game code is not similarly parallelizable. Carmack cited his Quake III Arena engine, whose renderer was multithreaded and achieved up to 40% performance increases on multiprocessor systems, as a good example of where games would have to go. (Q3A's SMP mode was notoriously crash-prone and fragile, working only with certain graphics driver revisions and the like.) Initial returns on multithreading, he projected, will be disappointing.

Part of the problem with multithreading, argued Carmack, is knowing how to use the power of additional CPU cores to enhance the game experience. A.I., can be effective when very simple, as some of the first Doom logic was. It was less than a page of code, but players ascribed complex behaviors and motivations to the bad guys. However, more complex A.I. seems hard to improve to the point where it really changes the game. More physics detail, meanwhile, threatens to make games too fragile as interactions in the game world become more complex.


Seems to me like he's just saying that multithreading would take time to take off... he was right.

He also expressed a lot of skepticism about physics acceleration cards, and once again he was right. It seems that his doubts about new technology are often correct.

 

 

Way back when there were a few interviews about him complaining about how hard it is to code for the processors. Basically similar complaints as he has versus the PS3.

Also it seems he is wrong about physics cards as nVidia and AMD supports them. Physics accelerators is just slow to take off but so far they seem to have benefited the PC with nVidia's stance on them with the future physx drivers and GTX 2x0 bundles.



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