Unusually competent interviewer. With standard "durr, what game are you going to do next" questions we would have never gotten these deep trains of thought and anecdotes from Carmack. Great job!
18:48 "I don't think the notion of infinite detail is actually all that important, it's more important to get the broad strokes of the artistic vision in there and if you take uninspired content and can look at that down to the molecular level it's still uninspired content". Wise words.
Alas you can see the origins of the curse of the low level API.. when competent people want control, and then you realize what everyone else is in the gaming industry lol.. which is something they do itself, given the pay differential between somebody that programs you know anything other than games and wants to eat at the same time.
Andy CQ DX unbelievable predictions as usual - not only predicts Oculus, but builds the first one for fun, gives them the exposure they need and then gets on board to steer the ship as CTO. A few years designing and building some of the most impressive and efficient rockets Ive ever seen, after of course inventing the FPS genre and giving Valve their leg up in the industry with the quake engine. An absolute legend.
Dude, computers ran Ray Tracing back in 1968. The idea and mathematics of it as well as computers rendering it has been around for 40 YEARS at the time of this interview LOL.
@@EvoPortal he was talking about running in real time, ray tracing has been around for decades but it wasnt in real time, usually would take hours just to render a frame
@@banguseater It was realtime. Could be done way back when it was invented. The graphical fidelity however.... Anything really exceptional quality still takes hours if not days if you want it detailed enough. It depends on actual raytracing vs path tracing, number of bounces, number of rays, etc.
@@jamegumb7298 @banguseater he was also talking about not tying it to a game engine, which he explicitly states is a much different scenario and one where that performance he got is impossible; and he was talking about doing that on clusters of multiple machines and parallelizing the workload across them. Has nothing to do with raytracing vs path tracing as was mentioned later; he didn't mention path tracing at all, only multi-ray which is algorithmically very different (contrary to what seems to be spewed on the 'net lately -- it's not a "better ray-tracing," it's a different thing with its own pros and cons, since the trace comes from the object target and not the point source)
Just hearing John talk at 4:15 about the problems they have with drawing graphics fast enough and the solutions he'd like to see, and then realising it became way way worse over the years, with now the tragedy called OpenCL to boot... We give great minds so much hassle to do their magic and improve the world. But he's a trooper for continuing in the business and keeping an open, playful mind. It's inspiring to keep control of your own happiness and not let all these incompetent programmers take away your joy.
John Carmack's gift seems to be to take knowledge available to everybody and do extraordinary things with it. His mental processing would be fascinating to observe.
You forgot that he gives back as well. Look at all the engines he released as source code for the general public. Look at what others have done with that knowledge. This guy is a programming legend.
This man might be humanity’s only hope and I’m not even on some meme shit. He’s truly invested in people’s best interest and the amount of power he can “render” in brain is phenomenal. True legand
I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty of taking one 4084x4084 texture and being able to split and load different parts of it into memory without needing to store 800+ mb of stuff in RAM. To get that working on current-gen hardware was seriously impressive. To get it running at 60 fps, with models and particle effects and animations and AI on top of that, is simply astounding. We can go back and forth over the benefits of megatextures, but you cannot deny the team's talent.
Wow. Carmack is truly incredible. Not only can you tell he really knows what he's talking about he's incredibly fluent in verbalizing his thoughts - to me that seems really difficult especially with all the complex topics he talks about. He doesn't even have to think about what he's just been asked even though that guy poses long ass questions ... I take my hat off to you, Mr. Carmack
Great interview. I thought the interviewer did a nice job! Asked concise interesting questions and let John Carmack finish his answers without interruption.
@Naeddyr We did have VERY poor lighting for this and tried to fix it in post - these are the results. Although this is the first time I have even been called CG. Ha!
Thanks PCPer. I could listen to a J. Carmack podcast all day long if it were out there. Love to read all his reviews. You guys are doing great productions. Great video quality. My only comment is that you consider getting come lighting tools like a bouncing board. Thanks guys for this. Brilliant!
What I love about Carmack is that he is a PURE old school nerd... devoted like hell with what he loves doing and doesn't care about anything else. Unlike "modern nerds" who follow nerd trends and so on...
This is the 2nd time I've ever seen of Carmack talk and I'm now a fan. He comes across as very knowledgeable about tech but even though he uses a lot of technical terms that go far over my head, he still has a good way of still putting broad ideas of computer functions into terms that people can understand. The way the talks about actual usefulness in games is more informative than I've heard from any company boasting about specs and features. He like an interpreter for computer language.
Not that carmack isn't an amazing programmer but raytracing is nothing new, it has been used all the way back in the 80's for animated scenes by pixar, and in the early 2000's there was already realtime raytracing albeit with low vertice count scenes. Nvidia just made their hardware good for the specific computations that happen within the process of raytracing, raytracing was already a well known and well utilized concept within the production and animation. The only thing new was that nvidia made it run acceptably in realtime.
Maybe not a shocker, but he predicted the move to ARM processors and ray-tracing (well.. he said analytic ray-tracing. We're using stochastic ray-tracing which is even better)
Regarding Infinite-Detail, Ryan is referring to Point cloud rendering by Euclideon,right? They’ve called it infinite detail for some reason(marketing-speak?),but its still based on finite resolution,discrete geometry(64points/mm^3 from their vid)so I'm not sure John's response is relevant. He's referring to vector/spline rendering which is resolution independent/procedural,while theirs is a discrete method that they say enables vast amounts of data to be displayed (but not infinite). am I wrong?
I do know a bit about 3D graphics programming and I still fail to see a huge step forward. Most of the tech for displaying Rage level is already present in Q1, except streaming. Take Quake lightmap (which is unique for all surfaces in the level) make it the main diffuse texture, make texcoords 32-bit, split texture into blocks and stream them from disk, make LRU cache with coord translation for actual textures rendered by videocard (cache subsystem is also present in Q1). Spend few weeks. Done.
This guy is just so open with his knowledge. It inspires me as a programmer that he is willing to share what he knows. How about ray-trace lighting? It will instantly produces accurate shading and shadows in the environment if the polygon count is high enough. It will wreck the CPU, but maybe one day GPU's will be able to handle them. Guess we'll have to wait another 20 years.
id tech 6 that's being used with the new doom apparently is using raytrace lighting, so more like 5-6 years from this interview date instead of 20. it's like carmack said here, in relation to the mega textures, when the first tests came up for it the stability wasn't there to be used in real time AAA titles, but 5 years later they had it working in rage. so the fact carmack was working on raytracing at this time it makes sense to think a game that might be coming out in 2016 or later will be using the first examples of raytracing.
liam cuthbert I don't think CPU's are capable of doing ray-trace lighting. You would need a powerful, dedicated CPU to attempt that. They're still using baked shadows for large scenes and soft(stencil/texture) shadows where necessary. If the new Doom is like Doom 3, with small areas, then maybe. with enough optimization. But definitely not large scenes. OpenGL can't even support more than 9 lights in a scene, so that doesn't inspire confidence in hardware capability.
FPGA Custom processors are showing good progress in running ray tracing engines in real time. Unless intel amd and nvidia implement custom hardware accelerated circuitry on their processors die , i dont see ray tracing taking off anytime soon. (on general computing scenarios ) I have seen a demo last year of a company (can recall the name) custom FPGA card running a modest Real time ray tracing demo with nice reflections and very accurate shadows running at around 30 to 40 fps , but the level of polygons was limited to 1 million , which thinking about it , is about the level of Poly detail of an average Dreamcast game cast back in 2000. Even with custom hardware , Ray tracing still has a long way to go , more R&D is needed , just like 3D Acceleration back in the Early 90'S. Imagination technologies (curiously the maker of the original Dreamcast GPU) recently acquired a company called caustic , and with this came Ray tracing hardware and software expertise. ( openRL API). Once a BIG company like Nvidia adquires a similar company and invests on making this tech native to their hardware , then the others will tryto catch up..and maybe then , we will have a real chance of seeing Ray tracing effects on regular games. (Competition benefits us all) As of now , ray tracing is nothing more than a pretty way to render 3D movies on expensive Render Farms.
Gray Fox I'm not sure what raytracing gains from reconfigurable hardware. It's data structure traversal with basic geometric operations. It seems you would gain the most if you got really simple CPUs, slapped a tiny specialized SIMD like that on it (hey, look, Dreamcast's SH-4 SIMD unit does exactly THAT and nothing else! 4-float vector multiply-accumulate, dot multiply, vector length estimation), made a shit-megaton of those, gave them a ton of common memory, and taught it to hide latency by switching tasks (unlike Cell). You can see, Intel Larrabee and CUDA fit into the picture... But perhaps polygons aren't the right approach when you speak of raytracing. Perhaps 1 Mio primitives is really more than plenty, perhaps we need only 200 000 primitives but make each of them more complex.
Ah, okay. I don't know if you fiddled with it at all when it was updated, but they added some more graphical options, and you can increase the texture detail a fair bit with them. I thought you might have been having some pop-in issues, or something. The textures are at least as detailed as the upper average game I find. Some other games may have much crisper ones, but it's decent... The extra detail in odd places and the uniqueness of the textures are really cool though!
If he's not the archetype image of the geek, I don't know who is! :) The thing that I love is how he focuses on technology and not gimmicks and tries to(and succeeds more often than not) to move the industry forward single-handedly. And it's just cool to listen to an intelligent guy for a change.
I remember when Carmack talked about the advantages of (at least) 16bit float arithmetics in GPUs ("take some alpha layers, a bunch of light sources, and feel like back in 8bit colorland..."), and now 32bits are standard. May his statement gave this development a push? It may be important which questions are raised and which ideas are expressed to give development a good direction.
John obviously loves this topic - and that's why he's a great programmer. That's why anyone is ever great at anything, when they have a genuine love, passion, and interest in the subject. Only in those rare circumstances, do we see true "genius", which isn't even really genius, it's just a kid at heart who absolutely loves what he's doing.
Also, I disagree that Rage had no dynamic elements in the scene. Shadows were real-time and had a noticeable lack of aliasing. The animations (especially facial) were the best I've ever seen. And the particle effects were nice, and there was no shortage of them. And a lack of dynamic lighting isn't really a disadvantage of the idTech 5 engine, as far as I can tell. Look at The Evil Within gameplay footage (/watch?v=rh8MYUn5kTc), around 4 minutes in fo rimpressive DL.
@avnertishby they call it infinite detail because you can have a dataset of a rock of 'unlimited detail' down to an atomic level for example, and the engine can still render it because it only renders your monitor's resolution of pixels.
Fantastic interview with two very intelligent people. I didn't know of Carmack's aspirations for HMDs stemmed this early on. He was right, the immersion of a HMD is revolutionary. Too bad we are entering another lull in HMD development. It's amazing to see how far GPUs have come since this interview and seemingly solved some issues mentioned here.
Well considering he's been doing this stuff since more or less the dawn of PC gaming and that he has practically invented some of the stuff that modern games are based on it's probably pretty safe to say that he can outmanouver most people in a conversation or debate about this kinda stuff :)
Rage can even be considered a step back from Quake 1. Q1 had unique baked raytraced lightmap, dynamically combined with reusable diffuse maps and also with dynamic point lights, cached, displayed. Rage has unique baked texture pre-combined with baked raytraced lighting without dynamic light, streamed, cached, displayed. See what I mean?
I didnt expect anything from the gameplay itself really. And i really see it as an experiment thing. Changing the way people think about how 3d games should be rendered. Heck, he even managed to get AMD to make an extension to do partially what he wanted.. that is quite a big thing. If you've listened to the explanation, there are a lot of issues on the PC that they came accross with rage. He's not going to be able to do much more until these are addressed. This helps gpu vendors with ideas too.
You seem to be confused about the key technology in Id Tech 5. Texture streaming is a feature in almost all modern game engines. Id Tech 5 features "megatextures," a technique for allowing artists to uniquely texture every square inch of the game-world. Only one production game (ET: Quake Wars) has had this functionality. No other engine can realistically uniquely texture all surfaces in a game environment.
Yeah, but that's still not enough. He basically wants what we had in the MS-DOS days. Direct access to hardware. Program your own drivers directly into your game. Actually, I would love this. Those days of programming are just so much simpler I think. No need to jump through a bunch of hoops.
I agree completely, they definitely work in entirely different fields. It's just that when I think "Geniuses in the video game industry", John Carmack, Hideo Kojima, and Shigeru Miyamoto come to mind.
@DavidH373 btw, could you possibly work on getting your video podcast out faster? I mean you said Wed. that it was important to watch the video version and then you totally ignored posting it. Thank you, and no insult intended, I love you guys!
Let me make this simple. I learn't how to build a PC in an afternoon but have been programming for over three years now and having read a book about much of the work Carmack has done on his games seriously doubt I will ever come even close to his level of ability in programming.
John Carmack seems to have a great passion for graphical programming though and he's clearly enjoying it. I could listen to him talk all day as he clearly knows what he's talking about. I imagine he does a fair bit of rubber duck programming as a result.
Anybody could build a computer. Off-the-shelf components, stick them in the labelled slots, make sure you get a good enough power supply, make sure you get a case that provides adequate cooling for the hardware. Easy.
1 Year later. John Carmack is right. I was surprised by the $400 Toshiba Intel i5 Win8 laptop with integrated HD4000 I just got my little nephew for x’mas. Many of the new modern games such as BF3, Farcry3, and Guild Wars 2 are quite playable and enjoyable on his little laptop.
I loved that. The interviewer had no fucking idea what he was talking about with that first mathematics question. So he just let him talk and said "cool" at the end. Basically, mathematics for video games is not any more complicated than what you learnt at school - geometry, algebra, etc. - but it's all about the application of it. Realising, for example, that you can get a good enough approximation with a simpler method that runs ten times faster than the mathematically precise version.
Unusually competent interviewer. With standard "durr, what game are you going to do next" questions we would have never gotten these deep trains of thought and anecdotes from Carmack. Great job!
yeah but man we totally would have
Put some respect on "the interviewer" Mark Zuckerberg's name
This guy is legend. A true walking encyclopaedia about technology and programming.
18:48 "I don't think the notion of infinite detail is actually all that important, it's more important to get the broad strokes of the artistic vision in there and if you take uninspired content and can look at that down to the molecular level it's still uninspired content". Wise words.
2011 and he already know everything about ray traycing in the future , such a Boss .
I'm not a programmer but god dammit, it doesn't matter what you do, this guy is an absolute inspiration.
Steve Z
Agreed he has contributed so much to mankind. Playing Doom 3 at the moment.
Anyone watching this in 2020?
His predictions of Ray tracing were pretty spot on
2022 here. still very interesting to listen!
2024, his thoughts on ARM CPUs for consoles is more poignant than ever!
Alas you can see the origins of the curse of the low level API.. when competent people want control, and then you realize what everyone else is in the gaming industry lol.. which is something they do itself, given the pay differential between somebody that programs you know anything other than games and wants to eat at the same time.
Good to see Mark Zuckerburg taking time off Facebook to do interviews.
Mark Zuckerburg is so lost
John Jackson zuckerburg wishes he could code like carmack: the nerd god
Eatmyass r/wooosh lol
I think he was talking about the interviewer, guys...
20:10 Carmack determines ray tracing is the way forward
Andy CQ DX unbelievable predictions as usual - not only predicts Oculus, but builds the first one for fun, gives them the exposure they need and then gets on board to steer the ship as CTO. A few years designing and building some of the most impressive and efficient rockets Ive ever seen, after of course inventing the FPS genre and giving Valve their leg up in the industry with the quake engine. An absolute legend.
He was implementing Ray tracing 8 years ago just on software at 720p 60 fps, the bloke is a legend.
Truly pushing the limit of the technical side of video games.
Dude, computers ran Ray Tracing back in 1968. The idea and mathematics of it as well as computers rendering it has been around for 40 YEARS at the time of this interview LOL.
@@EvoPortal he was talking about running in real time, ray tracing has been around for decades but it wasnt in real time, usually would take hours just to render a frame
@@banguseater It was realtime. Could be done way back when it was invented. The graphical fidelity however.... Anything really exceptional quality still takes hours if not days if you want it detailed enough.
It depends on actual raytracing vs path tracing, number of bounces, number of rays, etc.
@@jamegumb7298 @banguseater he was also talking about not tying it to a game engine, which he explicitly states is a much different scenario and one where that performance he got is impossible; and he was talking about doing that on clusters of multiple machines and parallelizing the workload across them. Has nothing to do with raytracing vs path tracing as was mentioned later; he didn't mention path tracing at all, only multi-ray which is algorithmically very different (contrary to what seems to be spewed on the 'net lately -- it's not a "better ray-tracing," it's a different thing with its own pros and cons, since the trace comes from the object target and not the point source)
Watching in 2020. He's sitting there predicting ray tracing and VR. Very cool!
...while wearing a quake 2 shirt that just now has ray tracing.
@@DaRealKing303 so true, lol!
Ray tracing has been around forever, just not in real-time.
27:02 - foreshadowing Carmack's entry into the world of VR development!
gia VRで失敗パールマ君はお宅
Its always nice to hear Carmacks Opinion , such a knowledgeable gentleman and very humble too.
Just hearing John talk at 4:15 about the problems they have with drawing graphics fast enough and the solutions he'd like to see, and then realising it became way way worse over the years, with now the tragedy called OpenCL to boot... We give great minds so much hassle to do their magic and improve the world. But he's a trooper for continuing in the business and keeping an open, playful mind. It's inspiring to keep control of your own happiness and not let all these incompetent programmers take away your joy.
such a badass Dev John, you know you dont waste your time when listening an interview with Carmack. amazing guy!
John Cormack is an absolute beast. He is on an entirely new level.
The father of FPS. Its safe to say that most FPS engines nowadays are some kind of variations of Q1 engine.
please write his name right :S
Faroskalin carmack lol but yeah u r right.
For a second there I thought: "Why is Mark Zuckerberg interviewing John Carmack?"
Same. However, you quickly realize that this guy displays too much animation to be the lizardman himself.
John Carmack's gift seems to be to take knowledge available to everybody and do extraordinary things with it. His mental processing would be fascinating to observe.
You forgot that he gives back as well. Look at all the engines he released as source code for the general public. Look at what others have done with that knowledge. This guy is a programming legend.
+Kyle Reece Indeed!
@Jeffrey Haines yeah and you had his mental processes and natural talent
It is Carmack, hard to not just sit and nod as he lays down the knowledge.
This man might be humanity’s only hope and I’m not even on some meme shit. He’s truly invested in people’s best interest and the amount of power he can “render” in brain is phenomenal. True legand
24:40 a decade later and UE5 has Nanite which does kind of what John Carmack is saying wasn't available back then.
Exactly, if he was around, we could maybe have gotten Virtualized Geometry sooner than UE5.
He's so ridiculously well articulated. Dude goes on like a rap god with overwhelming clarity on such complex subjects. What a beast.
Its his unique skill, Carmack literally talks 3 hours full technical with there are 3 hours of worth problems to solve, so clearly
I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty of taking one 4084x4084 texture and being able to split and load different parts of it into memory without needing to store 800+ mb of stuff in RAM. To get that working on current-gen hardware was seriously impressive. To get it running at 60 fps, with models and particle effects and animations and AI on top of that, is simply astounding. We can go back and forth over the benefits of megatextures, but you cannot deny the team's talent.
"Proceduralism is really just a truly crappy form of data compression" 18:15
This 32 minute interview is like listening to an entire semester in college about graphics programming.
Seriously man,this dude is from another world.
Wow. Carmack is truly incredible. Not only can you tell he really knows what he's talking about he's incredibly fluent in verbalizing his thoughts - to me that seems really difficult especially with all the complex topics he talks about. He doesn't even have to think about what he's just been asked even though that guy poses long ass questions ... I take my hat off to you, Mr. Carmack
First sec. in, I was convinced he was interviewed by Mark Zuckerberg :D
It's a common mistake. (Or is it a mistake?)
This is the most information dense youTube video I can remember watching.
thats a man that loves his profession if i have ever seen one
Great interview. I thought the interviewer did a nice job! Asked concise interesting questions and let John Carmack finish his answers without interruption.
Carmack while answering to questions, he just wrote the book with title "GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing and Voxels and more!"
John Carmack could be talking about how he would do my mom and i would still listen.
Love these interviews and content, always fun catching up on these on my spare time.
Am I the only one seeing Mark Zuckerberg as the interviewer!?!
Ryan is a human version of Zuck.
@Naeddyr We did have VERY poor lighting for this and tried to fix it in post - these are the results.
Although this is the first time I have even been called CG. Ha!
Has anything changed over the last more than 10 years since this interview was taken?
And the amazing thing is, we be unstoppable listening machines seeing him!
Video is icing, sound is the heart of the interview and its perfect. Thanks for posting!
Great interview, thanks a lot for doing it. Always awesome to hear Carmack talk about, well, just about anything.
Thanks PCPer. I could listen to a J. Carmack podcast all day long if it were out there. Love to read all his reviews.
You guys are doing great productions. Great video quality. My only comment is that you consider getting come lighting tools like a bouncing board.
Thanks guys for this. Brilliant!
What I love about Carmack is that he is a PURE old school nerd... devoted like hell with what he loves doing and doesn't care about anything else. Unlike "modern nerds" who follow nerd trends and so on...
I love interviews with Carmack :) He does all the talking, and that's what I'm interested in, so WIN
He already knew what I slowly came to understand recently 7 years ago.
Great insights from Carmac!
This is the 2nd time I've ever seen of Carmack talk and I'm now a fan. He comes across as very knowledgeable about tech but even though he uses a lot of technical terms that go far over my head, he still has a good way of still putting broad ideas of computer functions into terms that people can understand. The way the talks about actual usefulness in games is more informative than I've heard from any company boasting about specs and features. He like an interpreter for computer language.
just think about it
they were already thinking about implementing RT in 2011 (implementing in games of course)
No idea what he was talking about but I enjoyed listening to it :)
Mark Zuckerberg interviewed John Carmack? that's awesome!
I think the test for Vulcan maturity is hearing him give a different talk in each ear and answering questions on both at once whilst listening
Lol
This guy predicts the future very well!
10 Years a go Carmack had a Raytracing Game Engine built for himself. Nothing more to say here
Not that carmack isn't an amazing programmer but raytracing is nothing new, it has been used all the way back in the 80's for animated scenes by pixar, and in the early 2000's there was already realtime raytracing albeit with low vertice count scenes.
Nvidia just made their hardware good for the specific computations that happen within the process of raytracing, raytracing was already a well known and well utilized concept within the production and animation. The only thing new was that nvidia made it run acceptably in realtime.
Maybe not a shocker, but he predicted the move to ARM processors and ray-tracing (well.. he said analytic ray-tracing. We're using stochastic ray-tracing which is even better)
The thing I love the most about Carmack is the fact that he doenst dumb anything down. His mind deffinently on a whole different level.
Regarding Infinite-Detail, Ryan is referring to Point cloud rendering by Euclideon,right?
They’ve called it infinite detail for some reason(marketing-speak?),but its still based on finite resolution,discrete geometry(64points/mm^3 from their vid)so I'm not sure John's response is relevant.
He's referring to vector/spline rendering which is resolution independent/procedural,while theirs is a discrete method that they say enables vast amounts of data to be displayed (but not infinite).
am I wrong?
I do know a bit about 3D graphics programming and I still fail to see a huge step forward. Most of the tech for displaying Rage level is already present in Q1, except streaming. Take Quake lightmap (which is unique for all surfaces in the level) make it the main diffuse texture, make texcoords 32-bit, split texture into blocks and stream them from disk, make LRU cache with coord translation for actual textures rendered by videocard (cache subsystem is also present in Q1). Spend few weeks. Done.
This guy is just so open with his knowledge. It inspires me as a programmer that he is willing to share what he knows. How about ray-trace lighting? It will instantly produces accurate shading and shadows in the environment if the polygon count is high enough. It will wreck the CPU, but maybe one day GPU's will be able to handle them. Guess we'll have to wait another 20 years.
id tech 6 that's being used with the new doom apparently is using raytrace lighting, so more like 5-6 years from this interview date instead of 20. it's like carmack said here, in relation to the mega textures, when the first tests came up for it the stability wasn't there to be used in real time AAA titles, but 5 years later they had it working in rage. so the fact carmack was working on raytracing at this time it makes sense to think a game that might be coming out in 2016 or later will be using the first examples of raytracing.
liam cuthbert I don't think CPU's are capable of doing ray-trace lighting. You would need a powerful, dedicated CPU to attempt that. They're still using baked shadows for large scenes and soft(stencil/texture) shadows where necessary. If the new Doom is like Doom 3, with small areas, then maybe. with enough optimization. But definitely not large scenes. OpenGL can't even support more than 9 lights in a scene, so that doesn't inspire confidence in hardware capability.
FPGA Custom processors are showing good progress in running ray tracing engines in real time. Unless intel amd and nvidia implement custom hardware accelerated circuitry on their processors die , i dont see ray tracing taking off anytime soon. (on general computing scenarios )
I have seen a demo last year of a company (can recall the name) custom FPGA card running a modest Real time ray tracing demo with nice reflections and very accurate shadows running at around 30 to 40 fps , but the level of polygons was limited to 1 million , which thinking about it , is about the level of Poly detail of an average Dreamcast game cast back in 2000.
Even with custom hardware , Ray tracing still has a long way to go , more R&D is needed , just like 3D Acceleration back in the Early 90'S.
Imagination technologies (curiously the maker of the original Dreamcast GPU) recently acquired a company called caustic , and with this came Ray tracing hardware and software expertise. ( openRL API).
Once a BIG company like Nvidia adquires a similar company and invests on making this tech native to their hardware , then the others will tryto catch up..and maybe then , we will have a real chance of seeing Ray tracing effects on regular games. (Competition benefits us all)
As of now , ray tracing is nothing more than a pretty way to render 3D movies on expensive Render Farms.
Gray Fox Yup.
Gray Fox I'm not sure what raytracing gains from reconfigurable hardware. It's data structure traversal with basic geometric operations. It seems you would gain the most if you got really simple CPUs, slapped a tiny specialized SIMD like that on it (hey, look, Dreamcast's SH-4 SIMD unit does exactly THAT and nothing else! 4-float vector multiply-accumulate, dot multiply, vector length estimation), made a shit-megaton of those, gave them a ton of common memory, and taught it to hide latency by switching tasks (unlike Cell). You can see, Intel Larrabee and CUDA fit into the picture...
But perhaps polygons aren't the right approach when you speak of raytracing. Perhaps 1 Mio primitives is really more than plenty, perhaps we need only 200 000 primitives but make each of them more complex.
Ah, okay. I don't know if you fiddled with it at all when it was updated, but they added some more graphical options, and you can increase the texture detail a fair bit with them.
I thought you might have been having some pop-in issues, or something. The textures are at least as detailed as the upper average game I find. Some other games may have much crisper ones, but it's decent... The extra detail in odd places and the uniqueness of the textures are really cool though!
He was right about Ray Tracing.
Such a visionar....
If he's not the archetype image of the geek, I don't know who is! :)
The thing that I love is how he focuses on technology and not gimmicks and tries to(and succeeds more often than not) to move the industry forward single-handedly.
And it's just cool to listen to an intelligent guy for a change.
I remember when Carmack talked about the advantages of (at least) 16bit float arithmetics in GPUs ("take some alpha layers, a bunch of light sources, and feel like back in 8bit colorland..."), and now 32bits are standard. May his statement gave this development a push? It may be important which questions are raised and which ideas are expressed to give development a good direction.
2021 squad
very interresting, thx for the vid. btw, how many times does he say "on there" ??
John obviously loves this topic - and that's why he's a great programmer. That's why anyone is ever great at anything, when they have a genuine love, passion, and interest in the subject. Only in those rare circumstances, do we see true "genius", which isn't even really genius, it's just a kid at heart who absolutely loves what he's doing.
Also, I disagree that Rage had no dynamic elements in the scene. Shadows were real-time and had a noticeable lack of aliasing. The animations (especially facial) were the best I've ever seen. And the particle effects were nice, and there was no shortage of them. And a lack of dynamic lighting isn't really a disadvantage of the idTech 5 engine, as far as I can tell. Look at The Evil Within gameplay footage (/watch?v=rh8MYUn5kTc), around 4 minutes in fo rimpressive DL.
wearing the quake II shirt like a BOSS
oh i forgot ... HE IS :)
He predicted the Nintendo Switch and nVidea Shield! (ARM cores with dedicated gpu cores!)
@avnertishby they call it infinite detail because you can have a dataset of a rock of 'unlimited detail' down to an atomic level for example, and the engine can still render it because it only renders your monitor's resolution of pixels.
Fantastic interview with two very intelligent people. I didn't know of Carmack's aspirations for HMDs stemmed this early on. He was right, the immersion of a HMD is revolutionary. Too bad we are entering another lull in HMD development. It's amazing to see how far GPUs have come since this interview and seemingly solved some issues mentioned here.
Well considering he's been doing this stuff since more or less the dawn of PC gaming and that he has practically invented some of the stuff that modern games are based on it's probably pretty safe to say that he can outmanouver most people in a conversation or debate about this kinda stuff :)
the megatexture technology is still a marvellous thing, sadly the memory of ps3 and xbox 360 were completely limiting and insufficient.
Rage can even be considered a step back from Quake 1. Q1 had unique baked raytraced lightmap, dynamically combined with reusable diffuse maps and also with dynamic point lights, cached, displayed. Rage has unique baked texture pre-combined with baked raytraced lighting without dynamic light, streamed, cached, displayed. See what I mean?
Very nice interview here. John Carmack knows his stuff.
I didnt expect anything from the gameplay itself really. And i really see it as an experiment thing. Changing the way people think about how 3d games should be rendered. Heck, he even managed to get AMD to make an extension to do partially what he wanted.. that is quite a big thing. If you've listened to the explanation, there are a lot of issues on the PC that they came accross with rage. He's not going to be able to do much more until these are addressed. This helps gpu vendors with ideas too.
2 years ago he already knew that would be the case. Do you think high level people like him are kept in the dark for so long?
What kind of microphones did you use? The audio sounds like ass mixed with garbage. Please let me know the make/model of the mics. Thank you.
29:15 64bit only tools
You seem to be confused about the key technology in Id Tech 5. Texture streaming is a feature in almost all modern game engines. Id Tech 5 features "megatextures," a technique for allowing artists to uniquely texture every square inch of the game-world. Only one production game (ET: Quake Wars) has had this functionality. No other engine can realistically uniquely texture all surfaces in a game environment.
5:00 Vulcan foreseen
Yeah, but that's still not enough. He basically wants what we had in the MS-DOS days. Direct access to hardware. Program your own drivers directly into your game. Actually, I would love this. Those days of programming are just so much simpler I think. No need to jump through a bunch of hoops.
I love watching interviews with John Carmack. I want his brain
I agree completely, they definitely work in entirely different fields. It's just that when I think "Geniuses in the video game industry", John Carmack, Hideo Kojima, and Shigeru Miyamoto come to mind.
that sounds good to me too , but dont forget the detail of "number of iterations" ...
Nvidia should have listened to him 20years ago - we would have better hardware accelerated raytracing today.
@DavidH373 btw, could you possibly work on getting your video podcast out faster? I mean you said Wed. that it was important to watch the video version and then you totally ignored posting it. Thank you, and no insult intended, I love you guys!
Carmack is one of the very few people in the gaming industry who deserves to be called a genius.
Pre-Intel Ryan looks like Zuckerberg.
Let me make this simple. I learn't how to build a PC in an afternoon but have been programming for over three years now and having read a book about much of the work Carmack has done on his games seriously doubt I will ever come even close to his level of ability in programming.
Carmack the Master! Quake Forever!
I’d love to hear what he has to say about the PS5 and how PCs can compete in the future.
John Carmack seems to have a great passion for graphical programming though and he's clearly enjoying it. I could listen to him talk all day as he clearly knows what he's talking about. I imagine he does a fair bit of rubber duck programming as a result.
Is turning GPU to motherboard socket like CPU is it a good idea?
At what minute the interviewer got lost in conversation ?
10:50 predicting superiority of ARM in 2011. 9 years later Apple moves to it finally
also x64 and low-level API's. what a man!
Awesome interview hard to keep up with Carmack though
Anybody could build a computer. Off-the-shelf components, stick them in the labelled slots, make sure you get a good enough power supply, make sure you get a case that provides adequate cooling for the hardware. Easy.
Sick quake 2 shirt
1 Year later. John Carmack is right. I was surprised by the $400 Toshiba Intel i5 Win8 laptop with integrated HD4000 I just got my little nephew for x’mas. Many of the new modern games such as BF3, Farcry3, and Guild Wars 2 are quite playable and enjoyable on his little laptop.
Interesting to hear him pre-emptively talk about Oculus Rift in this interview.
I loved that. The interviewer had no fucking idea what he was talking about with that first mathematics question. So he just let him talk and said "cool" at the end.
Basically, mathematics for video games is not any more complicated than what you learnt at school - geometry, algebra, etc. - but it's all about the application of it.
Realising, for example, that you can get a good enough approximation with a simpler method that runs ten times faster than the mathematically precise version.