id Software's John Carmack has said it's frustrating knowing that PC hardware is many times more powerful than current consoles, but that developing on PS3 and Xbox 360 has its benefits.
Speaking during his
QuakeCon keynote last week, Carmack said the power discrepancy between PC and consoles is irksome, but went on to admit the Rage development team had some troubles getting the PC version running at 60 frames per second.
"It is extremely frustrating knowing that the hardware we've got on the PC is often ten times as powerful as the consoles but it has honestly been a struggle in many cases to get the game running at 60 frames per second on the PC like it does on a 360," said Carmack.
He detailed - with liberal use of technical jargon - how the relatively simple process of updating code on the PS3 and 360 could drive a programmer insane trying to do the same on PC.
"A lot of it's driver overhead issues, where there's so much that we do in the game, all of this dynamic texture updating where on the console we say 'alright, we've got a new page of data', we put that page in and update the page table that points to that.
"On the console that may just be a matter of writing it to memory, it's like 'here's the texture, let's calculate exactly where this part of the page table is' and then we just poke it right in there," he explained.
"On the PC that turns into potentially a tech sub-image 2D and if you're a programmer and you start single-stepping through that you'll cry. You won't make it back out. It'll just take forever."
In the same speech, Carmack said he was
disappointed that Sony and Microsoft don't allow access to debug menus on consoles. If you want to see id Tech 5 in action and haven't seen Rage's spectacular QuakeCon 2011 trailer yet, be sure to
check it out here.
