Carmack Says NGP Is a 'Generation Beyond' Smartphones

donniebaseball23 writes "id co-founder and all-around programming genius John Carmack, who has become a bigger fan of the iPhone and iOS platform recently, has given his take on the technical aspects of Sony's Next Generation Portable. He says that 'the Sony NGP [will] perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs.' Essentially, the fast approaching round of iOS and Android devices will still be well behind the capabilities of Sony's new handheld, which comes close to reproducing PS3-like visuals." New details have emerged since the NGP's confirmation yesterday: there will be different versions of the device, all of which can connect over Wi-Fi, but only one of which has 3G connectivity. The battery life will be similar to the original PSP, and the NGP will have two proprietary memory card slots. Sony says they considered 3D for the device, but they don't see how it translates to portable gaming. 1up has a hands-on with the NGP, as well as video of Epic's Unreal Engine 3 tech demo.

Comments

Which means...

[bhunachchicken]

"Carmack Says NGP Is a 'Generation Beyond' Smartphones"

Which means it probably has a price to match. Sadly.

Re:Which means...

[Lumpy]

Smart-phones will catch up in 6 months after it is released. Some of the things coming down the line from HTC will make it look like a outdated toy.

In the past...

[Aladrin]

In the past, portable gaming systems were always WAY beyond cell phones and other mobile devices. The fact that they recently caught up must be very scary for Sony.

It must worry them even more that there are dozens of new smartphones every year, but the next PSP will be 5 years from now. That's a lot of competition.

Because that's what he just admitted... That smartphones are competition to the PSP. There's not much point in comparing them, otherwise.

Here's, let's try this: The PSP NGP is far more advanced than the space shuttle. ... Yeah, that just doesn't make sense. The PSP NGP is far inferior to a supercomputer. Yup, again, nonsense.

lol

[Charliemopps]

"the NGP will have two proprietary memory card slots."

You'd think Sony would have learned by now.

Re:lol

[LordKronos]

Yeah, well despite all of their past media format defeats, they just won on BluRay so now they are more convinced than ever. They're like the person that's been pumping $100 worth of quarters into the slot machine all day and just got a $10 payoff...they're on a roll now. So they double down by playing 2 slot machines at once, so they can double their "winnings".

Re:lol

[JBMcB]

CD was developed jointly with Phillips, and Phillips is generally more credited with pushing CDs as a standard (most of the actual standards documents were released by Phillips.)

DVD was also jointly developed by Phillips and Sony, but it was based mostly on a previous standard by Toshiba.

Sony came out with a 3" floppy standard that went nowhere. A consortium of companies took the standard and developed the 3.5" floppy standard.

Betacam was a good professional format widely used, just like DAT, though not adopted widely by the general public.

So, yeah, when Sony teams up with Phillips to develop new media they hit home runs. On their own - not so much (Beta, 3" Floppy, Consumer DAT, Minidisc, Memory Stick...)

Re:lol

[jo_ham]

Video8 was never a pro format! It was better than VHS-C, but barely. Both Video8 and Hi8 were much more consumer focussed, although there were some pro Hi8 cameras.

MiniDisc is also far from a flop - it is used extensively in the radio industry and in ENG applications and is still one of the best replacements for cassette tape as a re-recordable medium. It failed in the consumer space because the consumer-level decks had the stupid Serial Copy Management System that prevented you making digital copies more than one generation deep (even of your own stuff), which the pro-hardware didn't have. It also faced the rise of the mp3 player. It was also pretty successful in the UK market before mp3 came along, with several manufacturers selling portable and deck players and combined HiFi systems with MD built in. The pre-recorded market never took off - there was no benefit over CD at the time, but as a re-recordable format it was a huge hit.

Yep, that's Sony

[LordKronos]

Wow. TWO proprietary card slots? The game media I can understand, and even though it's proprietary I'd understand the secondary slot being Sony Memory Stick (I'd hate it, but it's sony, so I'd understand). But we're not even talking proprietary as in Sony Memory Stick, but as in an entirely new media format. Way to go, Sony.

Oh, and they don't see how 3D translates to portable gaming? Well, I'm not surprised. They didn't see how motion control translated to console video gaming either, and laughed about how useless it was for 3 years before their "hey, hey, look at me....we can do it too, and in the lamest way possible" release of Move. I wouldn't be surprised if 2 years down the line they are suddenly all over 3D portable gaming and end up implementing it on the NGP by shipping new games with a pair of red/blue glasses.

I've heard this song before

[commodore6502]

"The Jaguar is 64 bit! Not as powerful as the N64, but more powerful than the 32 bit Sony Playstation." - Jack Tramel, Atari

"The PS2 will be able to do Toy Story graphics in real time!" - Sony

"The PS3 will be so great, people will WANT to pay $700 to get it!" - Ken Kutaragi

Fool me once, shame on you.
Fool me twice, shame on me.
Fool me 4 times, shame on both of us.

Re:carmack is an apple fanboy

[jo_ham]

Wow, so merely liking a platform that is unpopular with slashdot makes you a fanboy now? Is it possible for him to genuinely find iOS compelling for what he is doing in his line of work without him being what you are equating with some brainwashed, blind worshipper. Of all people to accuse of being "hypnotised by marketing" John Carmack is pretty low down on the list of likely candidates.

So to be an apple fanboy you need to:

* work on the platform and express that you quite like it, producing some pretty good stuff.
* ask a question that you don;t know the answer to, re: android and iOS app sales in a consumer demographic that he is interested in (people going to a con named after a game he created)
* express surprise at the answer received, one that points to him possibly reevaluating how much energy to put into porting his new engine over, given that a loose poll at QuakeCon suggests that sales on Android are as high as they are on iOS among his target demographic.

* Profit?

I'm not seeing how you can twist this into "he's an Apple Fanboy" unless you really just mean "anyone who says anything positive about iOS is a fanboy" which is probably it.

Did anyone read the tweet?

[GeorgeWright]

Posted here in full:

"Low level APIs will allow the Sony NGP to perform about a generation beyond smart phones with comparable specs."

Carmack isn't saying that the hardware in the NGP is a generation ahead of smart phones. He's saying that because of the APIs available to developers they'll be able to utilise that hardware more effectively (specifically that a developer will be able to squeeze an extra generation's worth of performance out of hardware with approx. the same specifications), which makes sense once you consider that the games are pretty much running on the bare metal, and that the entire system is optimised for gaming.

Does it matter anymore?

[guidryp]

I think the days are numbered for dedicated game machines when you can get Phones and tablets that will do games "good enough" for most and do much more besides.

If I stack a 7" Android tablet against the NGP. I see an open computer with plenty of free, low cost software vs a proprietary game machine with expensive proprietary apps, expensive proprietary media. I just don't think this model is really going to remain relevant anymore.

Re:carmack is an apple fanboy

[codepunk]

I am quite sure he prefers the iphone platform for the same exact reasons I do. The bottom line is performance. If you are a game coder being able to optimize every single clock cycle is not a nice to have feature but a must. Yes I know you can do native code development on the android but it is still a bastardization at best. It is the number one reason that iOS dominates mobile phone / platform gaming.