John Carmack gave GamesIndustry International a pretty fascinating interview, discussing his passion for Virtual Reality and the ways in which he sees gaming evolving in the future. Interestingly enough, for someone who exists on the precipice of the cutting edge, Carmack isn’t “all that excited about the next generation” of consoles.
“When people ask how tapped out is the current console generation, PCs are 10 times as powerful but you really are still not technically limited,” said Carmack. “Any creative vision that a designer could come up with, we can do a pretty good job representing on current generation and certainly on PC. In many ways I am not all that excited about the next generation. It will let us do everything we want to do now, with the knobs turned up,” he said.
“If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you’ve sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation. It will be what we already have, but a lot better. You will be able to redesign with a focus on D11, but it will not really change anyone’s world. It will look a lot better, it will move towards the movie rendering experience and that is better and better, but it’s not like the first time you’ve ever played an FPS. It won’t be like putting yourself in the virtual world. All the little things you can do on that, such as playing an audio cue over here, and turning your attention to that. That will be more of the discontinuous step like we’ve had with first going to 3D or first using a mouse.”
Carmack is placing a lot of faith VR headsets, and has been speaking to Sony, Microsoft and Valve about the possibilities that holds for gaming. For more info head to GamesIndustry International. Very interesting interview indeed.
John Carmack “not all that excited” by next-gen hardware [GamesIndustry International]
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