Industry legend John Carmack feels confident that id Software is more than ready to go in terms of graphics for the next-generation of consoles. While he hasn’t specifically stated much on specifics, he did relate that the studio is actively researching for the next generation.
"Games today look incredible, and there are few things that we can't do a pretty good job of rendering with the available techniques, so it is much more a question of balancing and trading off the development process against the fidelity of the product," he remarked on the Bethesda Blog (Bethesda and id share a parent company in ZeniMax).
"We have to be reactive to hardware trends, and there are still large bodies of work in the offline rendering world to consider, but I don't feel huge pressure to radically rework our graphics architecture right now."
"Still, I have done a fair amount of research work this year to help clarify our next generation directions, but so far they have mostly been negative results – I know we won't be rendering with a triangle intersection ray tracer on the next gen, for instance. I have a couple more research projects to undertake in the coming year, but the technical work I am most excited about doesn't have anything to do with graphics, but instead with the data management and work flow through the development process."
Carmack, a developer through and through, has already shown off what his team is capable of doing on iPhone with Rage. The efforts all stem from id Tech 5, the in-house proprietary engine developed by id Software. id Software boss Todd Hollenshead has made it clear that only ZeniMax and Bethesda would be using the engines outside of id.
[Thanks Eurogamer]
