John Carmack, co-founder of id Software, has admitted he’s “not all that excited” by the arrival of next-generation consoles.
Speaking with GI.biz, Carmack, who was responsible for creating classics such as Doom and Quake, noted that superior hardware isn’t always the way forward, pointing to the Wii and its implementation of motion-control gaming despite being technically inferior to its competitors.
“Sony and Microsoft are going to fight over gigaflops and teraflops and GPUs and all this. In the end, it won’t make that much difference,” said Carmack.
"When you get to this, it makes a really big difference in the experience. Nintendo went and brought motion into the gaming sphere and while only having a tenth of the processing power was able to outsell all of them in all of these ways. I think someone has an opportunity to do this here," he explained, referring to VR gaming.
In fact, this is a technology that he feels Sony “conceivably could have a product out in the next year.”
As it stands, Carmack isn’t too convinced that meatier specifications are enough to justify the arrival of fresh hardware.
"If you take a current game like Halo which is a 30 hertz game at 720p; if you run that at 1080p, 60 frames with high dynamic frame buffers, all of a sudden you’ve sucked up all the power you have in the next-generation.
"It will be what we already have, but a lot better."