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There’s still life in the old girls yet

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JohnCarmack

id Software’s John Carmack has been chatting to Gamespot and has come out in defence of the current generation consoles by saying that the doesn’t feel any of them have truly reached their max potential yet.

He goes on to say

the current platforms are so powerful and so sophisticated. I don’t think there’s any person anywhere that can really honestly say they know everything about one of these platforms

Which flies in the face of many developers who are utterly convinced they are using 100% of the PS3/Xbox 360’s power for their uber game but in truth we knew this already since they were then able to improve their game with the next title in the series.

Last year we heard how Uncharted 2 and Killzone were using all of the PS3’s power but with Uncharted 3 just around the corner we can now see that those statement weren’t entirely truthful and Gears of War 3 is showing us that the Xbox 360 still has some power left after all.

And as to why the cheap console can virtually compete head to head with the PC John had the following to say

So, that is a different situation than previous generations where there’s still a lot that can be exploited in there. I mean, we did know up front, "Here’s the memory we have, here’s the amount of processing cycles we have." [But] there’re still plenty of alternate directions that we could wind up looking at. It is interesting that on the PC side, we have systems that are 10 times more powerful than the consoles. But it’s frustrating in that a lot of the PC systems that are many times more powerful still have trouble holding the same 60 frames-per-second rate because of API overhead, API clocking issues, and things like that. We’re working with Intel and Nvidia on all these issues, but it is kind of frustrating when I know that the hardware is vastly more powerful but because we don’t have quite as tight control over it, a lot of power goes to waste.

As they say, power is useless without control.

He goes on to chat about how Sony have improved the ease of development for the PS Vita which is great to hear but at the same time he thinks they are very brave to take on the handheld market in a world full of iPhones and other smartphones.

And as for the Wii-U, well they are going to sit and wait and see what happens as he isn’t sure that the hardcore gamers are going to swap over to a Nintendo console, no matter how powerful, anytime soon.

Last Updated: June 13, 2011

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