Legend John Carmack says PS4 and Xbox720 won't be great

John Carmack is one those few people who has been into game development for decades. He’s seen the scene evolve and he’s been through the ups and downs of it. He’s best known for being the co-founder of id Software, the house that made titles, such as Doom and Quake and some of the sequels over the years. The existing gaming consoles, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 and the PlayStation 3 are a few years old now and like all gaming enthusiasts and developers, John Carmack is looking to the future. The PlayStation and the Xbox 720 as they are being called, are, we assume the topics of interest for many. Being one of the most important people in the game industry, John Carmack has his thoughts on the future gaming consoles. He was speaking with Gamesindustry about the next generation consoles. 

No official date on Doom 4 launch yet

He compared the current PC hardware and compared it to the consoles and he said that PCs were some 10 times as powerful as the consoles. There wasn’t any kind of performance limitation as such. He said that developers and designers could do a decent job at showing it off on the current PC hardware and even the current consoles. He wasn’t at all excited about the next generation of gaming consoles and he added that you could do all that you can do today, but with the quality turned up. He also spoke of Sony and Microsoft and how they’d fight with each other by offering more and more powerful hardware, offering gigaflops and teraflops of performance. He said, all of this wasn’t going to matter. He said, someone like Nintendo was able to outsell the other consoles by bringing a unique gaming experience with the Wii. Nintendo’s Wii, in comparison to the Xbox360 and the PlayStation 3 had a fraction of the performance. 

While speaking of a game like Halo, he said that the game currently runs at 30Hz at a resolution of 1280x720. That could be rendered at 1080p with 60fps and then, you’d have run out of power with the next-generation consoles. It would be like a movie and that would be better, no doubt.It would be good, but not like some kind of an all-new experience like it was when gamers first played their first-person shooter title.  

John Carmack is also in the news for his recent interest in virtual reality, which he says will change the world of gaming. id Software was recently acquired by Bethesda, which is another major game development company known recently for the very successful RPG, The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. id Software is currently working on Doom 4, which they’ve announced, but there isn’t an official date for the launch, just yet. These are also bad times, as id Software went through a layoff earlier this year.