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The gulf in power between consoles and PCs is massive, but id Software co-founder John Carmack says that driver overheads can make it very difficult for developers to make us of this extra juice.
“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 [Rage] running at 60 frames per second on the PC like it does on a 360,” said Carmack during his QuakeCon keynote.
A simple process on consoles can be a real pain on PC, he added.
“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.”
“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,” he concluded.
Carmack’s latest game, Rage, will be in stores on October 7 for Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC. In the same keynote, Carmack revealed a 22GB Rage install on Xbox 360.
We’ve all had an issue with a tech sub-image 2D at one point or another. We feel your pain John.
About the Author
Rage
- Platform(s): PC, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, Xbox One
- Genre(s): Action, First Person, Shooter
