If you are one of the many gamers who seem to spend sleepless nights wondering which next generation console will be the most powerful, maybe you would value some input from John Carmack who, unlike most of us has already had a chance to play around with both consoles.
Now that the Doom movie is about to premiere, the iD bigwigs are doing the media rounds in order to big up the movie and their range of products. G4TV hosted a discussion with iD software's big four, inevitably the interview strayed to the next-generation consoles.
iD game programmer and co-founder John Carmack, made it clear that he is an XBox 360 fan this time around claiming that Microsoft has made the better choices for this round of the console wars.
Mr. Carmack made a point of praising Microsoft's apparent love for the developer by stating that ...Xbox 360 has far and away the best development tools.
When asked directly whether he thought PS3 would be more powerful than x360 Mr. Carmack said, ...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 per cent easier to develop on is much more important than being 20 per cent more powerful.
Finally viewers were treated to Mr. Carmack's, and consequently iD software's, views on the new consoles, 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.
The views expressed by John Carmack seem to be in line with the latest stories coming out of developers who always seem to praise MS for making their job much easier. What we have to remember however, is that Sony is behind x360 in its progress and developers have yet to experience the full support the company is willing to offer, it is obvious though that learning to create for the cell will require adjustments by developers which may end up costing Sony.