Talking about something he wished hed done differently during Rages development, Carmack said this:
When we started on the game six years ago, I looked at the consoles and said These are as good as the PC, and our development strategy was to develop live on all the platforms. And now were looking at PCs that have ten times the horsepower of the consoles. Im making a large change in my direction just saying We should be building things efficiently on the PC and then deploying on the consoles. And we didnt make that as crisp of a distinction as we could have.
My development system now has twenty four threads and twenty four gigs of memory, and we can start putting on half a terrabyte of solid state drives, and these are the things that are gonna drive the development process on the PC. Im actually as excited about how were developing tht titles in this coming generation as the graphic enhancements and things that Im gonna make.
it is unhappily true that we have these consoles here running at sixty frames per second, and we could have these massively more powerful PC systems that struggle sometimes to hold the same framerate because of unnecessary overheads. If we were programming that hardware directly on the metal the same way we do consoles, it would be significantly more powerful.
''The real reason to get excited about a PS4 is what Sony as a company does with the OS and system libraries as a platform, and what this enables 1st party studios to do, when they make PS4-only games. If PS4 has a real-time OS, with a libGCM style low level access to the GPU, then the PS4 1st party games will be years ahead of the PC simply because it opens up what is possible on the GPU. Note this won't happen right away on launch, but once developers tool up for the platform, this will be the case. As a PC guy who knows hardware to the metal, I spend most of my days in frustration knowing damn well what I could do with the hardware, but what I cannot do because Microsoft and IHVs wont provide low-level GPU access in PC APIs. One simple example, drawcalls on PC have easily 10x to 100x the overhead of a console with a libGCM style API.'' Timothy Lottes
http://timothylottes.blogspot.fr
Thanks
Haider