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id Software’s John Carmack, the man largely responsible for the game engines that have powered many of the biggest games ever released, believes overheads are hampering the performance of PCs.
Machines that are more powerful than consoles are struggling to compete due to the way PC development is handled.
“It is a little bit of a shame that despite the raw horsepower, we are hampered by the arm’s length API interface because it is, unhappily, true that we have the consoles here running at 60 frames per second and we can have these massively more powerful PC systems that struggle sometimes to hold the framerate because of unnecessary overheads,” Carmack told CVG.
“Where, if we were programming that hardware directly on the metal the same way we do the consoles, it would be significantly more powerful,” he added.
Just how powerful would modern PCs be if these overheads were reduced? Given that modern PC hardware is leagues ahead of the tech inside current consoles the added resources would make them real beasts.
