Carmack frustrated that PCs are 'ten times as powerful as consoles'

09 Aug 2011 at 17:04:06 by John Robertson

Goes on to voice his disappointment that platform holders refuse debug access to users.

Speaking at QuakeCon, id Software's revered co-founder John Carmack bemoaned the gulf in performance between consoles and PCs.

However, the development of the PC edition of Rage has not been without its problems: 

"It is extremely frustrating knowing that the hardware we've got on the PC is often ten times as powerful as the consoles but it has honestly been a struggle in many cases to get the game running at 60 frames per second on the PC like it does on a 360," Carmack said.

Jargon warning! Carmack discusses the issues faced by programmers in trying to get updated code working on a PC:

"A lot of it's driver overhead issues, where there's so much that we do in the game, all of this dynamic texture updating where on the console we say 'alright, we've got a new page of data', we put that page in and update the page table that points to that. 

"On the PC that turns into potentially a tech sub-image 2D and if you're a programmer and you start single-stepping through that you'll cry. You won't make it back out. It'll just take forever."

Carmack went on to speak of his disappointment that Microsoft and Sony didn't allow users to access the console's debug abilities.

You can read our recent interview with Rage's creative director, Tim Willits, here.

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