XBOX 360 to be Carmacks Primary Development Platform

R

radeon580

http://www.beyond3d.com/#news22654

________________________________________________
id Software's John Carmack has often commented that his engines target
a particular feature set of a graphics board and he uses a certain
boards for his primary development; for instance the Doom3 engine was
initially targeted towards the features enabled by the GeForce 256
series of graphics processors, but overtime that was incremented to
DirectX8 and 9 level boards, with NVIDIA's 5800 (NV30) being his
primary development platform for a while. What has always been clear is
that the PC, and the capabilities of PC graphics, was id's primary
target market and development platform. From John's keynote speech,
transcribed here by Beyond3D forum member aaaaa00, it would appear that
this is likely to change, in the interim at least:

"In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an
XBOX 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be
starting on that initially. It's worth going into the reasons for
that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released
at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but
we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the
development process goes smoothly onto them."

Questions have often been asked about the state and longevity of the
games market on the PC, and although John states that the PC versions
of upcoming id engine based titles will appear on the PC first, it
could be quite telling that such a consummate PC developer is choosing
to base his development on the XBOX 360 for the time being.

However, reading into it a little further he clearly states that "most
upcoming graphics development" will be based on XBOX 360 - other than
the reasons he states, this could also be because the graphics
processor within the XBOX 360 will not only be relevant to the XBOX
360, but may also give more insights to future PC processors than those
around now or the next year. As our article on Xenos, the graphics
processor behind the XBOX 360, states, the graphics processor doesn't
map entirely on to any current DirectX based PC graphics processor, and
whilst falling short of Shader 4.0 capabilities (as they probably
haven't been entirely finalised yet, and certainly not when Xenos's
design was finished) it does have capabilities beyond the current
Shader Model 3.0 requirements. To add to that, the XBOX 360 processor
utilises a unified shader architecture, bringing around the potential
for a different balance in vertex to pixel loads, as well as a general
understanding of the performance mapping - while it is almost a given
that ATI will bring an architecture very similar to this for the PC,
NVIDIA have also recently made suggestions that they are looking into
it as well, so getting to grips with such a graphics processor now may
be beneficial for PC development later.
_________________________________________
 
X

Xfan

http://www.beyond3d.com/#news22654

________________________________________________
id Software's John Carmack has often commented that his engines target
a particular feature set of a graphics board and he uses a certain
boards for his primary development; for instance the Doom3 engine was
initially targeted towards the features enabled by the GeForce 256
series of graphics processors, but overtime that was incremented to
DirectX8 and 9 level boards, with NVIDIA's 5800 (NV30) being his
primary development platform for a while. What has always been clear is
that the PC, and the capabilities of PC graphics, was id's primary
target market and development platform. From John's keynote speech,
transcribed here by Beyond3D forum member aaaaa00, it would appear that
this is likely to change, in the interim at least:

"In the last couple weeks I actually have started working on an
XBOX 360. Most of the upcoming graphics development work will be
starting on that initially. It's worth going into the reasons for
that decision on there. To be clear, the PC platform will be released
at least at the same time if not earlier than any of the consoles but
we are putting a good deal more effort towards making sure that the
development process goes smoothly onto them."

Questions have often been asked about the state and longevity of the
games market on the PC, and although John states that the PC versions
of upcoming id engine based titles will appear on the PC first, it
could be quite telling that such a consummate PC developer is choosing
to base his development on the XBOX 360 for the time being.

However, reading into it a little further he clearly states that "most
upcoming graphics development" will be based on XBOX 360 - other than
the reasons he states, this could also be because the graphics
processor within the XBOX 360 will not only be relevant to the XBOX
360, but may also give more insights to future PC processors than those
around now or the next year. As our article on Xenos, the graphics
processor behind the XBOX 360, states, the graphics processor doesn't
map entirely on to any current DirectX based PC graphics processor, and
whilst falling short of Shader 4.0 capabilities (as they probably
haven't been entirely finalised yet, and certainly not when Xenos's
design was finished) it does have capabilities beyond the current
Shader Model 3.0 requirements. To add to that, the XBOX 360 processor
utilises a unified shader architecture, bringing around the potential
for a different balance in vertex to pixel loads, as well as a general
understanding of the performance mapping - while it is almost a given
that ATI will bring an architecture very similar to this for the PC,
NVIDIA have also recently made suggestions that they are looking into
it as well, so getting to grips with such a graphics processor now may
be beneficial for PC development later.
_________________________________________


You want to impress me stop using normal mapping to hide your low poly junk.
 
S

Shawk


he also said...

"Well everybody's kind of saturated with the marketing hype from Microsoft
and Sony about the next generation of consoles. They are wonderful but the
truth is they're about as powerful as a really high end PC right now and a
couple years from now on the PC platform you're going to be able to put
together a system that's several times more powerful than these consoles
that are touted as the most amazing thing anybody's ever seen".
 
M

msgs

So? The current PCs are several times more powerful than the "old" XBox, yet
there still isn't racers better than PGR, PGR2, Forza or RSC2 on PC.

I guess it all comes to this - you can

a) buy a next gen console for 300-400$, that has games that use 100% of the
consoles power, have no virii or spyware, no trouble with drivers etc, and
you have the luxury of playing in your living room with your friends on a
hdtv or projector

or

b) buy a 1500-2000$ PC, with all the problems mentioned above, and with the
knowledge that maybe in 3-4 years the developers will actually use some 50%
of the that power (and in that time you have spent some 1500-2000$ more for
more memory, new gpu, faster cpu, bigger hdd etc etc...)

Remeber, DX9 graphic cards have been availabe for ages. I don't think there
is a single game for pc that uses 100% of the features DX9 offers, cause not
all pc owners have DX9 capable cards.

But I'm pretty sure that there will be games using 360's features pretty
quickly. Why? Cause every single one 360 will have them.
 
J

Jonah Falcon

My new (high-end) PC only cost $900 including shipping. Had it built
from scratch. LOL

Jonah Falcon
 
N

NoRemorse

Jonah Falcon said:
My new (high-end) PC only cost $900 including shipping. Had it built
from scratch. LOL

Jonah Falcon

Can you list the parts and where you bought them?
 
M

Mountain Biker

Jonah said:
My new (high-end) PC only cost $900 including shipping. Had it built
from scratch. LOL

Jonah Falcon

Understandable as mine was about $600 and is midrange.
Still, it won't hold a ****ing candle to PS3 or Xbox360
 
M

msgs

-That's ok. Since it's not high-end. A high-end machine would have at least
1 GB DDR2 mem ( ), fast GPU (400-500$), a good motherboard (150-200$),
100GB HDD (70-100$), a good soundcard (50-200$), good power (50-150$) etc
etc.

For 900$ you get a mid-end machine, and not even a very good at that. Might
have been high-end 2 years ago.

And even if you added another 900$ it still wouldn't be as powerful as 360.
Add another 900$ and it might be at about the same level, but you'd have to
wait some 2-3 years before the games will use any of that power... ... . ...
 
A

Arthur Hagen

msgs said:
-That's ok. Since it's not high-end. A high-end machine would have at
least 1 GB DDR2 mem ( ), fast GPU (400-500$), a good motherboard
(150-200$), >100GB HDD (70-100$), a good soundcard (50-200$), good
power (50-150$) etc etc.

You guys have funny ideas about what "high end" means. It doesn't mean
"above average".
A multi-CPU Opteron or Xeon with 4 GB RAM, a Terabyte-sized SCSI RAID
0+1 solution and a $2k+ video card might be closer to high end.
 
M

msgs

Well, I figured since we were talking about PC vs console that high-end
would mean a good gaming PC. And that's not either Xeon or Opteron. There's
hardly any game that requires more than 1 GB mem, SCSI or that much hdd
space.

Also $2k+ videocards might be good for cad, but are shit for gaming.

The stuff you described below might cost some 4000-5000$, but wouldn't
nescessary be any better gaming platform than the "old" XBox. And 360 is
simply light years ahead of that. In gaming, that is.
 

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