John Carmack was and is one of the biggest faces in videogame engine development since Wolfenstein 3D, Doom, and Quake. He was at E3 to promote his company, iD Software’s, RAGE: their nearest upcoming release. While he was there, PCGamer managed to corner him for a 22 minute interview ranging from RAGE; to the current and future state of PC gaming; to the perceptive effect of input latency and how framerate affects it.

Look at how stable the framerate is!

Some points of interest from the interview include:
  • Texture resolution and memory limitations on consoles
  • Higher end PCs being approximately 10-fold higher performance than the consoles
  • Sandy Bridge is finally barely good enough for integrated graphics to be viable GPUs for games
  • DirectX and OpenGL APIs hold the PC back, looking forward to new movements to access GPU better
  • His interest focuses on the toolset to let the artists do more with less effort
  • PC Gaming is still viable but a minority
  • Input latency is longer than people expect, sometimes up to 100ms and beyond
  • The exciting yet not necessarily crucial nature of newer rendering technologies

John Carmack always has interesting interviews from his very down to Earth and blunt tone. If you have a free half hour and want to hear one of the best game programmers in the world talk about his trade, this is definitely an interview for you.