Weren't they saygint his back in the Atari Days...

I try not to listen to this crazy old man. He makes fine games, but it seems like he doesn't think before he talks. It is always one crazy comment after another.

Didn't he say a little while back that there's more to be seen from the PS3 but that it's just "too difficult" to code for? I can't imagine that somebody out there won't finally get it right and build a PS3 optimized engine or SDK...but I guess stranger things have happened.

On the other hand, some of the best games I've played aren't on the cutting edge of technology. Photo-realism alone will not make a great game.

I remember the good 'ol days of Contra.

Kudos to AMD/ATI, they'll get it right a couple years from now.

And this is why LAN parties are so fun - the connections are so much quicker! (I'm looking at you, Blizzard!)

"He moves on into the prospect of cloud computing, where gamers won't need to worry about the hardware limitations within the home, but the capabilities of the hardware mounted somewhere else"

Please! Cloud computing for games? I have enough trouble streaming low res porn over my crappy AT&T DSL line. I think I'll stick with games that run on MY video card. Thanks.

I agree; except that once in a blue moon some of that crazy talk comes true and everyone is like "holy sh1t!" Like when people said you couldn't do true side-scrolling 2d on PC hardware and Carmack goes and makes commander keen!

Johhny C has some odd opinions but he does also have plenty of insider knowledge. I wonder if he knows something we don't.

It is true that the jumps in graphical quality are probably diminishing, but I think there's a lot more in *gaming* hardware as opposed to graphical hardware. The game is not the graphics, they are just there to make it more immersive. Physics simulation adds a nice touch of realism and in some genres it can be an important aspect of game play (E.g. driving games). A.I. has loads of room for improvement and maybe one day hardware will provide more dedicated support for this.

...And my personal favourite: If we perfect speech recognition, artificial voice synthesis AND get a computer to pass the Turing test then just imagine the sort of games you could make!

I think Carmack just likes to hear himself talk nowdays.
ID has almost always had great game engines, well optimized and all that. Keep doing that. The Quake III engine was so good to play and work with(modder friendly).

As far as cloud computing, I would really worry about latency since even to good servers for games i get 40-60ms (17ms direct to a friend 4 hours away). So they would need servers in almost every large city for this to work.

I find it hillarious that there hasn't been any decent jump in video card technology in the past 2 years yet my $180 GTX 260 can play any game at 1680x1050 with most if not all eye candy on, a resolution just a few years ago was unheard of.

I'll believe that hardware power is becoming an issue when gaming actually pushes my card.

I think Carmack has been pretty accurate when talking about hardware and directions. He's one of the leading...if not the leading engineer on game engine design...and you have to have a high level understanding of hardware to create engines.

you know what this proves

pc>consoles. yet again. lol hehe btw how long have these consoles been going? 4 years almost? in tech terms, if i am right in saying, that is actually pretty darn old. gfx cards 4 years ago now are totally demolished by the power of today, so it is actually amazing games look as good as they do (i know optimising etc but still, give the consoles a little lee-way, right)

Hahaha, this fool again? Gee it's seems that when people are way past their prime they say the dumbest things.

I don't even have to say why what he says is insane.

I work in semiconductor ind...and he is right we are approaching a brick wall...unless there is a fundamental breakthrough...we are going to see a MAJOR slowdown in tech expansion...

The guys being an idiot. Unlike cpus, node shrinks bring more available power and speeds. We havnt maxxed out core speeds on gpus yet, and as long as theres node shrinks, theres more to add.
This is parallel computing, where have more actually helps, unlike cpus, which are more serial, and rely too heavily on software.
Get a grip John C

I guess the guy's never heard of graphene and metamaterials. Graphene based processors are coming in a few years as well as all kinds of new stuff. I'm getting this info from the EE Times, popular mechanics etc..., which have been around for decades.

Well, we went from what, 650 to 1Ghz last gen. Thats the largest jump seen in awhile. And having more die space just means more shaders etc, which makes the gpu work faster

I think hardware advancements have slowed down but it's not done progressing. There will always be some more advancements. One thought with cloud computing... what if my internet is down, now my console is dead too.

I've had an SLI 8800GT, overclocked E4600 to 3.0Ghz for over 2 years now. When crysis first came out, it was taxing at 1680 X 150, but completely playable. I just popped it in again yesterday, and it runs WAY better with the all the driver improvements since release. I still can't find a game that is REALLY taxing on my (probably below average now) gaming system. I used to buy graphics cards, and in 6 months be wondering why Half Life was struggling so much on my voodoo 1 3Dfx card. Now its been 2 years... and I still don't see the need to upgrade, other than maybe SSD in the near future. I blame consoles... they've dumbed down the graphics and slowed graphical improvements big time, now that everything goes console, then ported to PC. The upside is that maybe game developer will stop trying to make everything so shiny and pretty, and concentrate on what counts... is the game fun, and does it actually ENTERTAIN!

Carmack is a genious but I beleive he's wrong on this one. If the video hardware makers didn't find a way to keep making faster hardware then they would lose money. They willfind a way to keep going faster while lowering power. Whether it be diamond silicon or Quantium mechanics they will find a way $$$$.

1. Heat is limiting factor
2. We have yet to have more games such as Crysis (as in GPU demand)
3. Most PC games in the future will be ports from console where CPU will become a bigger factor than GPU (GTAIV any one?)

So, its the game devs, you listening Mr Game dev Carmack?
Weve got the hardware ready, wheres the games? I call BS. SUUUUUUURE its the HW. So, using SLI/CF we see scaling at 90% in the higher resolutions. We have Lucid Hydra coming out. Each gen, the cpu "keeps up" by allowing the new gens of gpus to have to go to a higher res.
Make better games, make our cards have to stretch their legs, and turn off the BS tap, cause it aint gonna flow here

I find it funny how many people here are bashing carmack. Some of you probably don't even realize he created the FPS genre with wolfenstein and then doom. Give the man some credit. When he says we have hit a wall in terms of hardware ask yourself this question. Just who exactly is willing to create a engine that would take advantage of todays current hardware? better yet, ask yourself this: Who is willing to create a engine to take advantage of tomorrow's hardware? Answer: Nobody. In other words, we have hit the wall.

id did with Tech 4. Even the GeForce 6800 Ultra at the time couldn't handle the engine on Ultra quality (500MB of uncompressed textures and all that) and it took a few card generations to get there. And so did Crytek with CryEngine 2 - even now what does it take to run Crysis at full whack?

But I'd have to agree with jaydeejohn here: if Carmack is correct and saying we're hitting a wall then that's teh perfect opportunity to stop make new engines over and over again and start doing something with the kit you have. How about some GAMES instead of glorified tech demos? If the hardware means you've hit the technical limit then put your time into what you're supposed to be doing and make some games.

I find it funny that he suggests cloud computing when consistent performing, low-latency, high bandwidth and cheap connections aren't really available to all. Him saying that they hit the wall on consoles might be true, but the advancements on the PC are leaps beyond what the consoles could offer today.




I think you're forgetting about Oblivion and Crysis, they pushed the hardware available then to their limits. The problem with Carmack's statement is that he didn't clarify that he was referring to consoles, as some of the developers are already at the X360's limits. With PC's developers have around a 1.5x~2x more processing and storage headroom.

I have yet to see a game that properly and fully utilizes any quad-core processor, and push a 275GTX or 4890.

I think that a wall was actually hit but its not a hardware wall, because innovations will continue to make better, faster, cheaper hardware that was not available before. I think the wall that was hit was the creativity wall. A lot of developers have become accustomed to building the same game they made years back and just make it prettier every other year. The problem with that was that their core audience became tired of the same old thing and when sales started to suffer most of them decided to blame the hardware rather than go back to the drawing board and create something new that we all would want to play. I do not agree with an earlier statement that its the consoles fault because the console market is a completely different market than the PC gaming marker, always has been always will be. Again the fault lies with the developer, Its cheaper to develop for a "locked down" hardware set. You only have to develop for one GPU type and spec one audio codec and one GPU, unless you decide to develop for all consoles but even then your game doesnt have to take up the same amount of space as it would on PC because each console has its own version only on the disc. To do that on the PC would be expensive imagine roughly 30 different versions of Crysis for each different video card out at the time and thats just the NVIDIA stuff!!. Obviously the developer is looking at the return of their investment money and unfortunately for the PC gamer its just cheaper to develop for the console and port to the PC, even cheaper if the target console is the 360 since it uses either XNA or DirectX. Ultimately it really comes down to a lack of creativity in the industry what good is a great engine and awesome hardware if no one develops the entertaining games that take advantage of them?

But Carmack isn't right. Now, he is specifically thinking about consoles, and what's topmost in his mind is the increasing lifespan of the consoles. And from that he pulls *reasons* out of the air. And goes wrong. Ultimately, of course we will run into physical limitations,.. but please, we're nowhere near yet. Which makes this sort of reasoning just as uninteresting today as it has been whenever it has been brought up in past (remembering a fool who figured 100MHz was a limit and who couldn't imagine 10 million transistors on a chip). Hardware progress slowed down? No it dam well haven't. Look at harddrives and graphics cards for instance, the thremendoes increase in performance in late years. And multi-cores and software multithreading is opening up the lanes for CPUs again. Now, next, the best value from more transistors, will be to increase the processor's numeric performance, vectorized and parallelized, hence Intel Larrabee and AMD fusion. There are immense gains available there. and there are immense software opportunities to utilize such performance.

And all tech & economy thingy futures, points towards distributed computing rather than cloud computing. Oh, I don't doubt that some software companies will be able to charge more and earn more that way, but technical progress don't favor that road. It reached its pinnacle back in the days of the X-terminal. Since then technology have gone way far in the opposite direction, still does and will forever. FFS use your heads! Technology and production economies places immense computing and storage powers, cheaply into every mans hand. What do you do? Centralize all computing and storage? And use network bandwidth to display results? No dam it! You use bandwidth to distribute computing and storage! The push towards cloud computing is driven by other concerns: Taking away power and control from the user and charge more. Just a few years ago, someone else had the same idea. Remember the net-PC?

"It’s great and there’s going to be at least another generation like that, although interestingly we are coasting towards some fundamental physical limits on things. We’ve already hit the megahertz wall and eventually there’s going to be a power density wall from which you won’t get more processing out there."


heard it a milion times

the mega hertz wall isa myth , we never "hit" a wall , just companies got more focused on this whole multicore thing and stopped trying to push speed limits beyound. i doubt we'll hit a "processing wall iether , at least not in what we can ,do physically , perhaps in the way that the consumers dont' need to processor power. new discivers are to be made , who knows what is around tomorrow's corner, i've long ago stopped buying the old story "we arereachign limits"crap along time ago , next year they could find a whole new way to do things and that could set off another technological revolution/evolution. consider this , computers were first born in teh 40's buy the 60's we had discovedred how to fit the switching capacity of a room full of vacumtubes into a single "chip". and today we can fit a million times that on one of these chips with multi cores , so who is to say what we may or may not do in the future ? many peopel say it is impossible to go faster than light but not 2 years ago scientist proved taychons exsist and they do indeed travel faster than light . So i have learned to take these "Limit" predictions witha grain of salt. because if ther is any thing that humans as a race has undoubtably proven , it is the simple fact that "if we can dream it , we can do it at some point"

I think gaming via cloud computing will only be viable when most of us has at least 5GBps of internet connection, same speed as usb 3.0. On average we're just at 2MBps I think....so maybe in 5 years?

@ hack_you. Why would it be viable then? Why would it be viable to concentrate computing resources to one spot and distribute video on 5 GBps then? Things like that will ONLY ever be "viable" if there are monopolies driving this. MS and Intel would wish it. I'm sure. They don't want everybody to have virtually the leading edge of technology and virtually the same product and power. Competition is forcing them towards that. But they'd rather sell something that is far, far below their top product, to the mainstream customer, for the same or higher price that they charge today. And then charge along a steep ladder for additional features and power from those who need it or are able to pay more. Intel would love selling the future "Core i7"s only to big computing centres, servers, mainframes and supercomputers for top dollars, and sell future "Atom"s to you, for the same price they sell consumer Core i7s today. And MS want to do the same with OSes. And they're going to sell this with all kinds of BS which, unfortunately, most of you are going to swallow just fine, as soon as they get rid of competition.
If you care at all about the future of computing, use Linux or at least Open Office for as much as possible, and use AMD CPUs (you don't really give up much, Athlon II and Phenom II are very OK and excellent value).

I agree hack_you

@vermil

You think AMD wouldn't LOVE to be a the only kid on the block? If you do, you know nothing about business. They all think the same way. Intel, MS and Nvida are not the devil. They are successful and have a successful product that dominates. That's all. There was a time when AMD dominated but they didn't have the product to compete. End of story. The ONLY ONLY reason people don't like said companies is because they are not the underdog. EVERYONE loves the underdog. Well, I don't. I go with whoever performs and AMD can't perform... yet.

I'm not even going to get started on Linux you fan boy. Dedication is a good thing, but not in this case.

There is also some intriguing technologies in development, experimental stage.

Optical computer with optical processors.
Much faster (1000? more? ), less power hungry.

@thearm
Linux performs in many places better of windows.