Carmack On AMD Vs Intel, iOS Vs Android

Tom’s Guide has an excellent (and very lengthy) interview with John Carmack that avoids simply spruiking the upcoming Rage running on iD’s new iD Tech 5 game engine and instead discusses more general computing topics. Carmack’s not pulling too many punches, either.

The interview’s well worth the full read, but to grab just a few quotes at random:
Carmack on Intel’s often derided internal graphics solution:

“The exciting, or interesting, segment really is at the low end. Intel integrated graphics parts have been the butt of a joke for many years — they’re just not something that you could consider using for games. But right now, with Intel’s current generation of integrated graphics parts, they have very good feature parity and they’re fully programmable.”

Or where he sits on the Android-versus-iPhone fence:

“The Android phones that I’ve played with didn’t displace my iPhone; I’m not carrying an Android phone with me, so I don’t have a lot of the personal push like I did with the iPhone. And when I did download the SDK, installed Eclipse and ran a couple of sample apps, it just didn’t grab me.”

Or where tablets and phones will go in relation to consoles next year:

“There’s been incorrect hyperbole about the power of these devices, where people are saying that they have console-level performance. The iPad 2 has about half the performance power, and that’s a ballpark estimate. But that does mean that mobile devices coming out, certainly next year, will be flat out more powerful”

I could go on and on, but you’re better off reading the whole thing yourself. It’s certainly eye opening seeing a top-level developer open up about where he sees the state of the PC and mobile industry right now.
[Tom’s Guide]


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