In an interview, with Nowgamer, tech director at ID Software, John Carmack, made some pretty bold claims about the company’s upcoming game, Rage. Check out a little of what John had to say below.
“When we finally got to a point where we had a locked frame rate and people could sit down and play it and feel it, it did become something that people could recognise. It’s debateable right now on this generation because it’s hard to do something that looks cutting edge while going at 60 frames per second, because I think that an argument can be made that we’re the best-looking game on this generation of consoles, the fact that we do it two times the frame rate of most of the competitors points out how hard that work was to get to that point.”
“But I really stuck with the fact we’ve got a lot more performance now than we had. I do a lot of these experiences where I do these A and B comparisons and ask “How does this look when we spend twice as much in fragment processing”? etc. and it is my belief that for an intense action game that you get more from going from 30 to 60 than from adding double as much work into the graphics picture that’s drawn there..”
Now, we don’t expect a developer to talk down an upcoming huge release, but what do you guys think about John Carmack’s statement? Will Rage be the best looking game this generation? Let us know below.
Source: NowGamer



April 12th, 2011
Posted in
Tags:



Rage definitely is a good looking game, and if its performance runs solidly at 60fps without experiencing any game-wrecking frame-drop or screen-tear then without a doubt, this game will definitely be a great technical success. However, I do think stating that Rage will be the best looking game of the 7th generation is a bit far-fetched. I’ll wait and see for myself if it really deserves to be called that once it comes out. That being said, I think developers being confident about their products is a good trait, as long that they keep their perspective realistic.
We hear shit like that all the time. Everytime some new FPS comes to the consoles, the dev apparently has a 10 foot stick up their ass, and they always make the claim it’ll be the best looking game ever, and then of course the 360 fanboys parade it around like its some sort of victory for their shit console.
We heard it with Metro 2033, we heard it with Brink, we heard it with Crysis 2, we heard it with Bulletstorm, but all those games get their asses handed to them by games like Killzone, God of War 3, and Uncharted. Theyre just trying to suck saps in into preordering a shit game and giving it decent sales for a week.
dude have you seen this bad boy in action? it’s a sweet piece of ass, let me tell you!
point cloud data for environments, smooth character movements, and a company that basically created the FPS genre behind it (Wolfenstein, Quake, Doom, etc.) and it’s got the makings of a seriously amazing game (especially considering that it’s gorgeous!
Here it comes again…I’m probably gonna get it on my PC.
If it runs at 60fps, then they are sacrificing graphics for performance.
It might be a great technical achievement, but it won’t topple Crysis 2, Killzone 3, Uncharted 2, Metal Gear Solid 4 graphically because performance isn’t taken into account.
Killzone 3 performance is rock solid, and without sacrifying graphics at all.
MGS4, same thing.
Uncharted 2 same thing.
But even if they are boasting a bit, these Dice guys have always done a good job, so I can’t see any reason for not trusting them.
As I wrote before, let’s hope they show us awesome facts.
@Mauro
K3 – yes 30fps all the time. Top notch stability.( Though some says that it is corridor shooter type game – much easier to optimise, Uncharted also has this type of gameplay)
*But*
MGS4 has very very unstable 60fps, in the end averange is 20s fps/s!:
Beyond3D framerate test of MGS4:
forum.beyond3d.com/showpost.php?p=1180399&postcount=103
Clip #1: 1566 frames, 1001 dupes, 21.623fps
Clip #2: 1825 frames, 1098 dupes, 23.882fps
Clip #3: 1032 frames, 601 dupes, 25.024fps
etc.
Whats your point here dude thats a 4 years old game you talking about and belive it or note even with its 21 fps mgs4 wowed an hole community of gamer and sets one of the first consoles graphic benchmark back these days. So respect the moustache
I’ll believe it when I see it.
What this dude said.
If the manage anything like the screenshots shown @ 60FPS. Then it defenetly is the most technological acheivement this gen.
LoL yea right though.
Haemmm…
…it reminds me Crytek’s words at E3 last year, exactly the same words.
Problem is: just words. Then we all know what happened when facts came into place, terrible, ridiculous heavy facts.
What else: let’s hope these guys will show us more facts than empty words.
yawn… haven’t we heard Crytek say the same thing? Funny thing is you don’t hear Naughty Dog saying stuff like this… cause they don’t need to.
That is true, I love developers that don’t gloat and end up creating a masterpeice.
Yeah.
Guerrilla, Santa Monica, Naugthy Dog, I have never heard them boasting, but I have always seen their masterpieces blowing away everything.
I had to login just to remind everyone. This company invented the FPS genre. Before these games were called first person shooters, they were called Doom clones. Quake revolutionized 3D graphics on the PC, accomplishing it with a good processor that supported floating point. At that time a 3D acceleration card was not needed and weren’t really around. The Quake engine has been modified to death and is still practically in use or pieces of the code are still in use. Doom 3 set the stage awhile back for its pristine graphics and quite honestly I wish I could go back into a time machine because that was PC gaming at its prime =). Lets not forget John Carmack is genius and designs rockets in his spare time. So before you lament what he says I think you should just listen. Every company that made the games mentioned in these post will tell you this man is a major influence. Carmack is a very detailed, technical no bs person. I haven’t once read or listened to something he said that turned out to be not true. If you want to know more about his and Id’s technology, I suggest you take a trip to QuakCon. I don’t think Naughty Dog or Crytek have events of that magnitude every year.
Also its worth your while to listen to his keynotes.
http://youtu.be/1_SdC8LVODY
he could have invented a time machine and he still couldnt out perform uc2,kz3 etc and at 60fps. Not unless he uses the time machine to go back in time before the ps3/360 uses the cpu’s/gpu’s etc to get the graphical performance of the aforementioned games, and uses them for the framerate, and continuously swaps back and forth whilst going back in time ad infinitum.
sure it will be great looking game, but at 60fps, summat has to give on consoles. remember sony designed the ps3 and they directly support naughty dog, guerilla games etc in their making of games, and this is one reason why they end up looking stunning, this is something carmack has no access to.
Why do people think of UC2 as a technical benchmark? The game looks good, but it isn’t leagues ahead of other games. It never did, honestly.
Don’t get me wrong, I loved the game. I just could never see where all the graphics hype came from. Besides really slick animations and lighting, it isn’t mind blowing.
Well maybe uc2 won a lot of prizes …
@MegaShot419
I wonder why you are wondering this.
I think you didn’t play Uncharted 2.
Why take our word for it , look at what df has to say on subject of uc2.
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-uncharted-article
For me personally it’s the scale and variety of environments along with colour and artistic beauty , as much as the technical side of it.
Why take our word for it , look at what df has to say on subject of uc2.
(add http etc) eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-tech-analysis-uncharted-article
For me personally it’s the scale and variety of environments along with colour and artistic beauty , as much as the technical side of it.
@ MegaShot419:
Those wondering why UC2 is considered the best looking console title to date are obviously the same group of people whom judges and critiques graphical quality based on sub-par youtube vids,instead of actually playing the game.
how is it that everyone keeps saying it can’t compete with other games and yet it seems as though none of them have even looked at the gameplay footage? this game is downright gorgeous, using technology that hasn’t even been used prior to this, point cloud data! (instead of making a rock out of polgons where each side is a congruent shape they instead make it out of billions of tiny points creating a far more realistic rock)
heck, take a look! http://assets.vg247.com/current//2009/08/rage_gc09_screenshot_3.jpg
that was from 2009! look at the environments! that’s in-game! on an xbox 360!
You mean sony’s fork of opengl and ibm’s compiler and tools? Basically your saying the man who made a real time 3D renderer in software on a pentium mmx with a fpu unit cannot go at a low level to push bits to six vector dsp’s through direct memory access. Do you know whats the difference between a parallel paradigm and a distributed paradigm? Your talking about a company that programmed in assembly the music of Doom by utilizing the registers in Yamaha OPL FM synth chip to come up with new effects general midi couldn’t even do. Your talking about one of the first companies to release a game software that went through the 640k limitations of DOS and started using extend memory with a Watcom compiler. Yeah maybe Id won’t have the code that sony’s first party share amongst each other but those first parties have the luxury of only working with one platform. Id’s algorithm for the game is still very impressive without the need of their code, honestly, who needs their code anyways? If you read the actual article, he talks about the good qualities and downfalls of all the platforms, even the pc. Also ps3 effects can be done on other platforms. Saboteur with its cell based morphological anti-aliasing is just a click away in my AMD catalyst on my 5850 card.
Yeah that idea of : he was the first or he invented is so useless. Ford was the first car made, is it the best car today ?
“X” Game is the best looking game ever.
I’m tired of hearing that.
I doubt they gave up anything. Who else is using megatextures?
Im not going to post anymore, but anyone on here trying to say something bad about Carmack you’ve already discredited yourself. We haven’t even seen Rage yet. But you know Carmack is going to deliver.
“Now, we don’t expect a developer to talk down an upcoming huge release”
unless you’re DICE who seems to be butt-sore that they even have to put BF3 on the consoles
retro games are the best of the best!!
Those who say they are tired of hearing this, is it because I do not know the history of John Carmack and what he has done for the world of video games, he never tells lies about their future games, I think the shooters, some have no idea is quake, doom or wolfenstein, find the history of id software and this man and woe can say whatever they want but not knowing anything and say anything because they think that John Carmack is like John Riccichelo
Also I know this site is all about consoles and ps3 vs xbox360. Nobody ever talks about pc games. The best looking game is the first Crysis with a mod on like the Real Life mod.
http://youtu.be/KNb0gMcexeU
I know I know. I post something spectacular and there will still be naysayers. Nit pick all you want, you know deep inside the graphics in that video are ridiculous.
Rage Game play 1:
http://youtu.be/8DcKLmZYWFw
Rage Game play 2:
http://youtu.be/h-B16t48i9M
The gameplay video is of the 360 version, so EAT IT, its 60 frames!
id always makes great looking games, just remember Quake 1, Quake 3, Doom 3… at the time of their release these were the best looking games. It’s true, that they had horrendous system requirements, but Doom 3 on the original Xbox looked absolutely amazing for a 6th generation console game. It looks nearly as good as an early Xbox 360 or PS3 title.
These may be ‘just words’, but this is John Carmack saying them.
That counts for a lot.
I remembers ages ago when he said that the the PC and PS3 version would benefit from “mega textures”. I wonder what’s happened to them. He also mentioned the lack of disc space on 360.
ID SOFTWARE IS THE KING of all FPS games. Who dont belive should have 15 years or less.
Geez , i dont care if he’s Krishna or Jesus or whichever deity u believe in ( if any). No disrespect to carmack , but he’s not getting this or any other game this gen running at 720p with high res textures at 60fps( I’m not even convinced it will be virtual 60fps with those things implemented ).
This hardware is 5 yrs old and has bandwidth issues on both platforms due to their age( 360 with it’s 10mb edram , and the usual res issue resulting from that meaning they either keep it sub 720p or have to implement tiling and have the subsequent hit on the hardware , plus losing the free aa etc they get keeping it sub hd on the edram) and on ps3 there is the ubderpowred gpuand it’s 256mb of video ram, which whilst possible to shift things onto spu, isn’t a miracle worker and there’s still limited bandwidth , which is why many games run low res textures on explosions and smoke effects etc.
I’m willing to bet my house that something has to give , just look at crysis 2 on consoles . I’m sure it will look great etc , but best looking game this gen running at 60fps, as jim royal would say “my arse!” u seriously expect me to believe that naughty dog, guerilla games, sucker punch ( all getting technical and financial support from Sony’s elite technicians ), along with dice and every other dev on planet are somehow unable to do things that carmack has magically done , when it’s as substantial as running at 60fps. He is the only man on planet to figure whatever it is he figured out, out???
He’d be selling this technology for hundreds of millions as it would keep this gen going for another 5 years easily.
U can spout all the gobbledygook u like , but he’s not a magician and bandwidth shortages can’t be magically made to disappear. So ppl stop talking bs
forza 3 plays at 60fps with 2x aa at 720p
it does, but it also makes steps to cut back in other parts of game. (alpha based effects are pared back and ac2 used, thus saving bandwidth,and pared back crowd detail amongst other things). The game is also relatively linear and isnt anywhere near as taxing as say a fps mp online, and thus they can afford to up detail level. (Just look at gt5)They also used 2.msaa not AA, which is lower level form of aa.
have a look a the df analysis. Its still pretty impressive nonetheless, but we not talking best looking game ever amounts of detail .
http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-forza3-evolution-article
it does, but it also makes steps to cut back in other parts of game. (alpha based effects are pared back and ac2 used, thus saving bandwidth,and pared back crowd detail amongst other things). The game is also relatively linear and isnt anywhere near as taxing as say a fps mp online, and thus they can afford to up detail level. (Just look at gt5)They also used 2.msaa not AA, which is lower level form of aa.
have a look a the df analysis. Its still pretty impressive nonetheless, but we not talking best looking game ever amounts of detail .
( add http etc to link )eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-forza3-evolution-article
@suarez07
Elite technicians? You think engineers are technicians. Your saying all this stuff but I bet you couldn’t tell me if its better to write a 2D game directly to the frame buffer or on flat three dimensional polygons. Also tell me how to do bitwise operations in c with a char variable and how to abstract that with OpenMP to make multi-threaded applications not have race conditions. Though thats an abstract, in my algorithms I use that method. And while your at it, tell me how to write the Ascii letters “C” and “c” in octal numbers. Also where is the ascii interpreter located on a computing device? Do you know Mr.Technical?
Blah blah blah blah rdubya
I never claimed to know about programming , and if u know so much, why exactly are u here, and not programming for a living alongside mr carmack et al
Facts speak for themselves. Explain how they going to magically achieve what no other dev has done this generation( or come close) and run at 720p with high res textures at 60fps , whilst utilising suitable levels of detail to compete with games like uc2, kz3 , crysis 2 ( not huge fan of crysis 2 , but regarded by many as a outstanding looking game ) . Every game even within that list makes compromises to sustain image quality at 30fps. ( crysis drops res of textures and the base resolution itself to sub hd, uc2 doesn’t use alpha heavily and uses particle bases effects for explosions , as does kz3 whilst utilising mlaa and some low res textures to save bandwidth)
Bf3 with it’s advanced lighting system again only aims for 30fps, yet fb2 is considered at cutting edge of engines.
More to point I’ve seen footage of rage and whilst being great looking on pc, dial that down a few notches for console and it’s nowhere bear as impressive, but is still great looking. All footage I’ve seen is pc with the guy using a 360 pad, with no console footage available so far.
Theres famous saying by Einstein who says if u truly understand something u can explain it to a child . However I notice u continually revert to talking about things most ppl have no knowledge about to continue the pretence u have some sort of superior insight and authority on this subject area, when in reality it’s clear ur just full of bs.
Simple fact is, if carmack had found way to get 60fps at level of detail found in titles like uc3, kz3, halo 3 , crysis 2 ( with a genuine hd resolution), and no need to compromise elsewhere, he’d not be making a game he’d be selling the technology for billions( not to use user of course) , as devs would kill to be able to increase performance substantially in this way with no reason to worry about bandwidth. Furthermore unreal would be going out of business as their new engine which requires substantially more power than the wonder tech of carmack to achieve the same results. Just think what he could do given specs they using???
In fact I’m sure microsoft and Sony would pay handsomely to save the need to produce newer consoles when carmacks wonder tech can do all this , it would save them billions in short and long term
Sorry, I find “best looking” much more subjective than “it looks realistic”. I myself like a much more cartoonish art style. Something outlandish. Something artsy. Something…well, different.
Each have an appeal when done well IMO . Can think of good and bad examples of each, although cartoony style graphics hide the deficiencies of this gens hardware brilliantly. In fact look at zelda windwaker and see how well that’s aged, it’s still beautiful now
“Rage MAY be the best looking game this generation”
Using the word “may” means that it’s not 100% fact.
I have no doubt in my mind that they’re shooting for best graphics of this gen.
Graphics are subjective anyways. There should be categories when judging graphics:
1. Textures
2. Lighting
3. Shadow fidelity
4. Specular mapping
5. Water
6. Animations
7. Physics
8. Pop-in
9. Framerate (vsync’d, 30fps v-locked or 60fps v-locked)
Also under framerate… I wouldn’t call anything the best if it has any sign of screen tearing.
Uncharted 2 is still my favorite console looking title ever. It’s a flawless masterpiece in my eyes.
I might be the best looking game this generation, time will tell. That doesn’t change the fact that the gameplay looks like another mediocre FPS title.
When i see the gameplay trailers, it just reminds me of DOOM 3, and i really didn’t like that game. It was so linear, filled with monster closets, and killboxes.
I hope im proven wrong.
40+ comments and not one thumbs up or thumbs down . Are ppl in here finally maturing a bit , surely not lol??
No man,
the thumbs up/down thing just doesn’t work any more.
It’s been two days now. Did you give them a try?
Lol should have know u couldn’t find that many mature people in this place in one thread
i must say many of those on here have a point. Although crysis 2 is gorgeous in every sense of the word, it still doesn’t compare to games like uncharted graphically. The PC version was a huge disappointment we’ll see what they do IF the dx11 patch comes out like they promised. However, from what i’ve seen, rage will be a great technical success. That is, if the visuals rival games like uncharted and running at a stable 60 fps, i’d totally jizz myself.
KZ2 and KZ3 are technically both huge and epic masterpieces, however, the gameplay just didn’t tickle my fancy. However, no complaints about the graphics or performance whatsoever. hopefully rage will rival this combo of visuals/performance. then we’ll be talkin dice!
Since you can’t post links on here with out them going under moderation. John Carmack talked at quakecon about how rage will be better on the ps3 because of blu-ray storage. He also talks about working on microsoft about the limited space on a dvd and how he would like to able to use the whole dvd and not put the game on multiple discs. I wonder if the new disc format is because of him?
Just delete the http//www. part of link , that’s what I do now . It’s kinda annoying though, as it’s always useful to be able to back up what ur saying with a source .
good idea, thanks suarez07
kotaku.com/#!5031985/rage-and-ids-lovehate-relationship-with-the-ps3
Crikey mate, that article is well out of date lol
He later went on to criticise ps3 and it’s rsx, saying that at the point at which he was speaking the ps3 was running about half the speed of 360 version and they were working a lot harder having to split everything into separate jobs for the ps3( presume he means splitting things into jobs for spu’s rather than everything being primarily done on gpu on 360), but later it Was added he expected both versions to run the same on both systems . ( bit-tech.net/news/gaming/2009/07/31/carmack-rage-runs-slowest-on-ps3/1) carmack is quite outspoken about preferring working on 360
Nothing new here about multiplatform devs not liking having to program on ps3, although Irrational games have found methods of design with this that improves both versions .(imagequalitymatters.blogspot.com/2010/11/tech-report-irrational-talks-bioshock.html)
I mostly like the visual aesthetic of RAGE. It’s both clean cut and cartoony, giving the title a feel like a graphic novel, which is a breath of fresh air compared to Crysis 2 and Killzone 3, both of which try to be dark, gritty, and realistic, and end up being somewhat unpolished.
60 FPS at 1024 X 768 carmack. you cant do gay magic on 5 yr old hardwares. Cmon let the cat out of the bag