The new gaming workhorse: Apple OS X

[Dryden]

EA Announces Mac Titles At WWDC:

Inside Mac Games News: EA Announces Mac Titles At WWDC

Electronic Arts' Co-Founder, Bing Gordon, announced the company's return to the Mac with six Mac titles including Command & Conquer 3, Battlefiled 2142, Need For Speed: Carbon, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Madden NFL 2008, and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008.

id shows off new engine on Mac:

Update: id Shows Off New Engine on Mac - Kotaku

id Software's co-founder and technical director, John Carmack, demonstrated id Tech 5 during the keynote address and commented, "Since many developers at id have made the switch to the Mac for their personal use, we decided it was now time to bring our core game technology to OS X. After a rapid bring up of the codebase, we were delighted to find that the latest Macs are the fastest systems in our offices for some of the time consuming processing jobs and will be contributing to our development process in many useful ways."

The new id rendering technology practically eliminates the texture memory constraints typically placed on artists and designers and allows for the unique customization of the entire game world at the pixel level, delivering virtually unlimited visual fidelity. Combined with a powerful new suite of tools designed specifically to facilitate and accelerate the content creation process, id Tech 5 will power games that contain vast outdoor landscapes that are completely unique to the horizon, yet have indoor environments with unprecedented artistic detail.

Carmack's comments are intriguing, because the second paragraph suggests that the engine is rendering solids with individually shaded/colored pixels, as opposed to what devs have been doing for years by rendering solid objects through stacking multiple triangles, and then placing textures over them like wallpaper.

The implication is huge, because if Carmack has actually figured a way to render fully painted models in real time using "brute force" (really, really fast modern processors), then graphics cards as we know them will be a thing of the past.

While he's demoing the new id Tech 5 engine on a Mac, this sounds as if it will be the real "killer app" that the PlayStation 3 needs to separate itself from the XBox 360.

 

[Clarity]

The implication is huge, because if Carmack has actually figured a way to render fully painted models in real time using "brute force" (really, really fast modern processors), then graphics cards as we know them will be a thing of the past.

If anyone can do it, he's the guy. Carmack is a funny one. Even back when they were breaking new ground with each title, he was far more focused on the 'engineering' behind them than the design of the games themselves. You could talk to him about a great level, or a great 'feel' for one of their games, and his eyes would glaze over. Get him talking about some revolutionary way he thought of to approach one of the technological barriers on the way to creating the game, and he would come alive.

I still owe him an apology for letting his car go to a kid with no license, couldn't drive stick, and already had a DUI on his record. Oi.

 

[Mike80]

oh boy my Windows fan of a co-worker will love seeing this announcement

 

[Dryden]

Forgot about this thread. I'd done some reading on "id Tech 5" about a week ago and found that what Carmack has actually done is created an engine that models worlds painted with one giant "macro-texture". Whereas his comments first reminded me of the "textureless" way that the Nintendo 64 drew images, his macro-texture engine now allow up to 20Gb+ for just the one texture -- a single graphic file that blankets the landscape from horizon to horizon.

The engine can stream that data from the single graphic file. The game dev savings here are tremendous, in that artists won't have to "cut-up" their textures into the hundreds or thousands of individual files that they do now, such as making "tiles" of 512 x 512 textures, since they could now conceivably make a single landscape painting that is one 262,144 x 262,144 texture. With this, artists are free to "paint" landscapes naturally, which means less repetition in scenes from reused texture tiles. Since the textures don't need to be "edge friendly" to make tiles, they can have more uniqueness at their edges, too.