John Carmack is a great many things. He's an idol to programmers, a model of the American dream and a giant lizard. Wait, no, scratch that last one. John Carmack is not a giant lizard.
Gamesindustry.biz posted a few choice words Carmack had recently on Microsoft's new OS, Vista, and none of them are flattering. You'd think that some of the "the's" and "is's" would be, but you would be wrong. All of Carmack's articles are filled with pure derision.
Hit the jump for the finest in choice quotes.
"Nothing is going to help a new game by going to a new operating system. There were some clear wins going from Windows 95 to Windows XP for games, but there really aren't any for Vista,"
"They're artificially doing that by tying DX10 [DirectX 10] so close it, which is really nothing about the OS. It's a hardware-interface spec. It's an artificial thing that they're doing there.
"They're really grasping at straws for reasons to upgrade the operating system. I suspect I could run XP for a great many more years without having a problem with it."
He makes excellent points there, and if anyone in the world would know about this sort of thing it would be John Carmack. If the amount of times he's created revolutionary bits of code in his game development business were somehow magically transformed into beautiful women, well ... he would have slept with a FUCKTON of beautiful women. You can't argue with that kind of experience.
Contest:
11:51 AM on 01.12.2007
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PS . OMFGZ NEX JUST BLOGGED A NAUGHTY WORD!! OH NOES!!1!!
if it ain't broke don't fix it
Now if SPORE somehow ends up requiring Vista... I don't want to think about it, my wallet is hurting.
I had to see for myself.
Yeah!
and carmac reminds me of my old boss. the guy actually owned lizards. and licked his lips all the time. what a creep.
but fuck it how am I going to run crysis?
caveman ughlympics, i love this game and i want a remake
Thanks for the laugh.
scrap - approximately 2.71 fucktons to a shitton
Aside from that Vista is going to have LIVE, and if M$ is going to do what I think they are going to do, then gaming is going to get huge. Instead of the average PC user playing Solitare all day they can offer more games through LIVE to get them playing those games. I would not be surprised to start seeing XBLA games on Vista, they have already showed some and there are only going to be more.
Once Microsoft can get all of the Vista users into something more like Geometry Wars, even UNO on LIVE, then they are going to be able to get them to get into other stuff like RoboBlitz and AssaultHeroes. And from there possibly MMOs and full retail FPSs and RTSs. Vista is going to be huge for gaming because Microsoft wants it to be big for gaming.
that nsa shit scares me too
Just to be honest, I don't think that most hardcore PC gamers actually care about Live, existing online multiplayer is already enough for us. :P
Anyone who has a computer pimped out enough to run Vista well (and who will also be early adopters of DX10 cards) is most likely already big into PC gaming. The OS is certainly going to be nice, but I can't see how it's going suddenly to bring in new gamers out of nowhere.
My iMac won't run Boot Camp for whatever reason, so my active Steam account goes unused for now, at least until Leopard ships and Boot Camp is officially supported by Apple. then I can figure out WTF is going on on my iMac.
I have a friend who can't run it at all on his laptop... Not because it doesn't run... It runs beautifully, but because Apple outsourced two different companies for wireless networking cards on MBP's. He bought the other kind. And his wireless is broken on XP. And Bahamut, what are you doing editing video on Windows for anyway? FCP is just as fast as anything you're using in XP, and possibly more compatible. My render times on FCP are lightning fast compared to on Premiere in XP.
Whenever I look at the specs of my computer and compare it to others, I feel they are 2 different languages
The G5 is a much different processor than x86 (most notable the crazy Xeon setup in the Mac Pro desktop computers), with the G5 being a PowerPC based processor, which is best used in integrated/dedicated computer devices. PowerPC processors are used in the Gamecube, Wii, Xbox 360, and the PS3's cell processor is a PowerPC variant fully compatible with regular PowerPC (shorthand for PowerPC is just PPC), and if you've played those systems, they perform very well for what they are intended to do (one thing at a time, play a single videogame). PowerPC's aren't exactly the greatest processor in the world for desktop computers (multiprocessing, x86's are better at this), and Apple was somewhat idiotic in using them for the longest time, but ever since they've made the jump to x86 processors, performance (at least with Universal binary and Intel-only programs) is altogether better compared to the last highest end G5/PPC based Macs, and even a few non-Universal programs work better on Intel Macs (I've only *heard* performance is better, I've never used PPC Macs very much myself). I would've likely never made the switch to getting a Mac, had Apple never switched to x86, seeing I'm a Linux user, and in the future Linux will be much more usable on Intel Macs, and drivers will be usable, especially video card drivers.
Carmack is right about Vista not being needed by most consumers, and DX10 could easily be implemented into Windows XP, but Microsoft obviously needs more reasons for consumers to jump into Vista, which is understandable, because they need software sales to stay in business. I still will probably NEVER get Vista (even if it becomes as perfect as POSIX-based operating systems), because I'm getting closer and closer to cutting my reliance on Windows entirely, which comes with cutting various Windows-only games from my life, but I'm living with it well enough (and the Mac version of Cave Story helps too. Hope you know about that version, Sheir).
Also strange is that I notice a few games in Linux run better than they ever did in Windows, on the same hardware. Stepmania is the main game I notice, because in Windows the framerate is just fine, but it stutters sometimes, which makes the game annoying as hell to play (think losing a massive combo JUST BECAUSE OF A STUTTER), but in Linux it runs smooth all the time, stuttering only on extremely rare occasions. Mac OS X is similar in performance, but my Mac is much higher end than my Windows/Linux computer, so it can't be very fairly compared.
I may have deviated a bit from the original topic, but I kinda wanted to say all this crap, and I don't care if nobody ever reads it.
As for the G5, it was a troublesome CPU and had quite a few problems running code designed for the earlier Motorolla processors. IBM and Motorolla had different ISA implementations. Plus, PowerPC really sucks for stack-based code. It's really an embedded processor designed for vector code, which isn't used often in desktop applications. That's why Apple always used Photoshop for its benchmarks -- it's all vector code. Try running a Java app, and you'd probably be more productive and have more fun trying to eat a soft boiled egg with a pair of tweezers. Funny, you'd expect such a "clean" architecture to run circles around an old clunker like x86, but that's not the case... by a longshot.