Carmack: 60 fps “hard” to achieve on Consoles; Comments On His Coding Style

It’s a known fact that RAGE runs at 60fps. You could probably say that RAGE was one hell of a technical achievement on consoles, although, that framerate is actually hard to achieve on consoles, says Carmack.

He advises developers to stick to 30 fps if they cannot maintain a constant 60 fps. Certain games (like GT5) have a variable framerate where it usually drops when there is a slight load, but Carmack doesn’t prefer that sort of design.

“Unless you can maintain 60fps almost all the time, you are better off locking at 30 instead of dropping all the time. 60 is hard,” he said.

Consistency is a good thing, but on current generation consoles that 60 fps smooth framerate doesn’t come easily. The best examples are the CoD games, as they usually run at a Sub-HD resolution to accommodate the frame rate.

He also mentioned that Doom 3 was his first C++, which should be a well known fact many because the idtech 3 engine was re-written in the C++ programming language.

“Doom 3 was my first C++, it is nothing to hold in high regard,” he revealed.

In related news, RAGE is 50% off on Steam right now, so if you haven’t played it yet, what are you waiting for?

Thanks for sending this in, Rahul.