id On RAGE "Cluster!@#$" and Lead Platforms [Oct 07, 2011, 9:33 pm ET] – Share – Viewing Comments
Kotaku asks the musical question "Why Was The PC Launch of Rage Such A "Cluster!@#$"?," getting answers from id on the topic, who express frustration with problems that were largely caused by driver issues. Along the way they also address how the game being designed for consoles holds back the PC edition. "You can choose to design a game around the specs of a high-end PC and make console versions that fail to hit the design point, or design around the specs of the consoles and have a high-end PC provide incremental quality improvements," John Carmack tells them. "We chose the latter." He also bluntly addresses why this makes sense for id (emphasis Kotaku's):
"We do not see the PC as the leading platform for games," Carmack added. "That statement will enrage some people, but it is hard to characterize it otherwise; both console versions will have larger audiences than the PC version. A high end PC is nearly 10 times as powerful as a console, and we could unquestionably provide a better experience if we chose that as our design point and we were able to expend the same amount of resources on it. Nowadays most of the quality of a game comes from the development effort put into it, not the technology it runs on. A game built with a tenth the resources on a platform 10 times as powerful would be an inferior product in almost all cases."
Parallax Abstraction wrote on Oct 7, 2011, 23:11:
It's id's job to ensure that their brand new engine works properly and if that requires special driver considerations, it's their responsibility to contact NVIDIA and ATI and get that done before the game comes out. If they called these companies and said "John Carmack would like to talk to you to make sure id Tech 5 works with your cards", they'd probably have their lead drivers engineers on the phone with him instantly.
My understanding is id Software was in contact with AMD months ago and they did work things out but then AMD fucked up and didn't deliver. NVIDIA drivers work fine, even older ones. JC actually spoke somewhat about the AMD efforts during his super long sit down talk at Quakecon.
This isn't even anything new with AMD/ATI. They have some sort of total lack of interest in being aggressive with their OpenGL devel. NVIDIA owns them in the professional world because of it and occasionally we see it rear its head in gaming. It probably doesn't help that there is major upheaval over there and they seem to be slowly imploding on every front.
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