October 19, 2005
iD's Carmack Loves the Xbox 360
John Carmack, the best programmer in the universe, has said some very nice things about developing for the Xbox 360. Basically it might be 20% less powerful than the PS3, but it is way easier to program and make games for, which in the end will equal more great content. One hopes.John Carmack: “Xbox 360 has far and away the best development tools [talks about software development support]…and the hardware is comparable”
Geoff: “So you don’t think PS3 is going to more powerful [than Xbox 360]?”
John Carmack: “PS3 is probably marginally more powerful, in terms of raw flops and graphic operations, but that’s not really the best way to look at things. When you look at these development cycles that stretch over years and years, being 20% easier to develop on is much more important than being 20% more powerful. I make little nitpicky decisions about say, well, I prefer the symmetric approach that MS has over the asymmetric Cell approach, but you can do great games on either one of them, and I make fundamental decisions based on development tools and depth of documentation, which Microsoft has been superior on.”
