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John Carmack has talked at length about what he expects from the next
generation of consoles, planning to create brand new tech that allows
his company to create cross-generational games that span Xbox 360/PS3
along with whatever their successors may be. The id software technical
director also believes that console-makers are in danger of slamming
into a power wall that may be impossible to engineer around, with the
platform holders perhaps looking to cloud computing to continue the
console arms race.
Carmack's comments are found within a collection of three videos posted a week ago by Polish site CD-Action,
in which the idTech mastermind talks without respite about the engine
behind new game Rage along with other hardcore topics, armed only with
a comedically branded soft drink. Watch him go: it's absolutely
remarkable. According to CD-Action, the interview was recorded around a
month ago.
"I have a good sense of where technology is going but
larger things about what businesses choose to do and big businesses
like Microsoft and Sony... those are decisions above my pay grade and
not really in my line of business, or what I think about a lot,"
Carmack says. "I think that Xbox Live... the advent of that and the App
Store with the iPhone are wonderful signs of the future of digital
distribution. I think there's a decent chance that one of the next gen
consoles will be without optical media... the uptake rates of people
who have broadband connects surprised everyone this generation. It's
higher than what the core publishers and even the first party people
expected."
Carmack goes on to talk about how he believes that one
or the other of the major HD console-makers will jump the gun with the
leap to the next generation (hinting that it will be Sony), but in
common with many other developers believes that their best interests
are served by prolonging the lifespan of the current consoles.
"The
whole jockeying for who's going to release the first next gen console
is very interesting and pretty divorced from the technical side of
things," he says. "Whether Sony wants to jump the gun to prevent the
same sort of 360 lag from happening to them again seems likely. As
developers, we would really like to see this generation stretch as long
as possible. We'd like to see it be quite a few more years before the
next gen console comes out, but I suspect one will end up shipping
something earlier rather than later."
The general roadmap for the
next gen architectures has already been laid down though, and the
future appears to be all about variations of Intel's Larrabee
proposition, where many tiny, fully programmable cores combine to form
one powerful chip that may well work as both CPU and GPU.
"We do
have a very good sense of where the technology is going because we talk
to NVIDIA, we talk to Intel, we talk to ATI/AMD and they're all
pursuing variations on massive multi-core processor integration,"
Carmack says, "There's lots of interesting things about that, about how
we need to think about things on the game development side to take
advantage of that."
Real-time ray-tracing has often been seen as
the holy grail of graphics rendering and simply unobtainable with the
levels of technology we have available, but it may well find a place
within the next gen consoles.
"The big question is, are we going
to be able to do a ray-casting primitive for a lot of things?" he
ponders. "Certainly we'll still be doing a lot of conventional stuff
like animated characters and things like that very likely will be drawn
not incredibly differently from how they're drawn now. Hopefully we'll
be able to use some form of sparse voxel octree representation cast
stuff for some of the things in the world that are gonna be
rigid-bodied... maybe we'll have deformations on things like that. But
that's a research project I'm excited to get back to in the relatively
near future. We can prototype that stuff now on current hardware and if
we're thinking that... this type of thing will be ten times faster on
the hardware that ends up shipping, we'll be able to learn a lot from
that."
However, while he predicts that the leaps in cutting edge
console technology are set to continue (certainly there is no hint from
him that Microsoft or Sony will follow a Wii-style strategy of simply
adding minor or incremental upgrades to their existing hardware), we
are swiftly reaching the point where platform holders will be unable to
win their battles against the laws of physics.
"We talk about
these absurd things like how many teraflops of processing and memory
that are going into our game machines," Carmack says, speculating
off-hand that the next gen consoles will have at least 2GB of internal
RAM. "It's great and there's going to be at least another generation
like that, although interestingly we are coasting towards some
fundamental physical limits on things. We've already hit the megahertz
wall and eventually there's going to be a power density wall from which
you won't get more processing out there..."
That being the case,
he speculates that the game-makers could move into different directions
to provide new game experiences and at that point, the almost mythical
cloud computing concept could make an impact.
"There'll be
questions of whether we shift to a cloud computing infrastructure...
lots of interesting questions about whether you have the computing
power in your living room versus somewhere else," he says, noting that
while latency is a fundamental issue, the sheer scope of storage
available online opens up intriguing possibilities. "Certainly the
easier aspect of that is 'net as storage' where it's all digital
distribution and you could wind up doing an idTech 5-like thing... and
blow it up to World of Warcraft size so you need a hundred petabytes of
storage in your central game system. We can do that now! It's not an
absurd thing to talk about. Games are already in the tens of millions
of dollars in terms of budget size and that's probably going to
continue to climb there. The idea of putting millions of dollars into
higher-sized storage... it's not unreasonable to at least consider."
Returning
to the concept of the next generation console, John Carmack is already
planning to take advantage of the new hardware and is planning to have
systems in place to ensure that a sneaky pre-emptive launch from one of
the platform holders won't catch id software by surprise.
"What
I'm planning to do is set up a new rendering engine that co-exists with
the current one... and I intend to develop it like that, so you have an
idTech 5 version and then have everything working the same [with] an
alternate data set that you can render with a different version," he
revealed. "So the hope would be that if we do get some flashy new
graphics hardware on there that we would possibly have the option of
releasing a game cross-generational like that. Same game, same design
across everything but different media set, different rendering
engine... That also allows me to work on something without having to
involve the entire team. That's something where we can take a couple of
people, go out, work on prototyping proof of concepts while the rest of
the company is building the production titles."
Thanks to 'Rangers' from the Beyond3D Forum for the heads up on these videos.
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