"John Carmack: You have to take advantage of what’s on the table. Although it’s interesting that almost all of the PS3 launch titles hardly used any Cells at all. We hired one of the best PS3 guys around who did the Edge Acceleration technology for Sony – he’s on our team now so we’ve got some of the best PS3 experience here. In fact when we were doing all of the tech demos, we’d bring in the developers and they’d walk over and say, “it’s running on the PS3!” (laughs) They’d sit there and stare at it for a while.
There’s no doubt that with all of the platforms that we have running here PS3 is the most challenging to develop on. That’s what I’ve been saying from the beginning. It’s not that it was a boneheaded decision because they’re a lot closer the fact that they can run like this [points to the 4 different gaming stations running Rage] – they’re a lot closer than they’ve ever been before. It’s a hell of a lot better than PS2 versus Xbox. But given the choice, we’d rather develop on the Xbox 360. The PS3 still does have in theory more power that could be extracted but it’s not smart. We don’t feel it’s smart to head down that rat hole. In fact, the biggest thing we worry about right now is memory. Microsoft extracts 32 megs for their system stuff and Sony takes 96. That’s a big deal because the PS3 is already partitioned memory where the 360 is 512 megs of unified and on the PS3 is 256 of video, 256 of memory minus 96 for their system…stuff. Stuff is not the first thing that came to my mind there. (laughs)
The PS3 is not the favorite platform but it’s going to run the game just as good. To some degree there’s going to be some lowest common denominator effect because we’re going to be testing these every day on all of the platforms, and it’s going to be “Dammit it’s out of memory on the PS3 again, go crunch some things down” That’s probably going to be the sore spot for all of this but because we’re continuous builds on all of these we’re going to be fighting these battles as we go rather than build these things out and go, “Oh my God we’re so far away from running on there.” Which is the situation where Enemy Territory is suffering with at a degree right now, and a lot of other people have that.