John Carmack Keynote Address - Quakecon 2002

John Carmack chose not to grant any interviews at Quakecon 2002 from what we were told. With all of his effort going into wrapping up Doom III, this is understandable. Presented below are some comments from his keynote address at Quakecon 2002, and the Q-and-A session that followed his keynote address.

John Carmack gave his Quakecon 2002 keynote address to fans that overflowed the room where the talk was being held. It was a great talk and very informative. I wish all keynote talks had a question and answer session that was as good as this one.

All of the pieces are in place for Doom III, I am now finally starting to see things pay off. The core project development was started as soon as Quake III was wrapped up. We are already working with 3rd parties on the engine and the technology, so you can expect new titles to be introduced using the Doom III technology soon.

The question is, where do we go from here? The next logical step is to develop an engine that is designed exclusively around the technology that you will find in the new technology video cards such as the ATI Radeon 9700 and the Nvidia NV30, which has not been released yet. The sad part about this, of course, is that we might miss an intermediate step, but I think that is what is going to happen.

64 bit color is going to be important on any move forward. A monitor can only display 32 bits of color, but perhaps the good reason to move toward 64 bit color is that the human eye can see more. Monitors are all different, and you don't get a consistent look on all monitors. I have built some experiments on trying to find a software based solution to calibrate monitors, but as of yet I have not found anything that is workable.

Game development is about approximating what we want to do and striking a balance till the new technology comes along that will allow us to do it. Doom III has a flexible lighting system, without a good lighting system it makes the textures rough. The next evolution in the graphics development will be tone mapping and I think that the industry is already starting to move in that direction. The cleverness comes in the optimizations of the game, not in clever hacks.

Doom III will feature six custom back ends to take advantage of the specific features of the video cards. Currently this will only apply to cards from ATI, NVidia, and 3D Labs. Maybe at some point we might do something with Matrox and SIS cards, but for the moment that has not been determined. The Matrox and SIS cards will be able to run the game, but because of the lack of a custom back end, we will not be able to take advantage of the special specific feature of these cards.

Most older video cards will be supported via a fall back path, but of course you are going to lose some of the graphics fidelity. What is really needed is an API that is the same on all of the cards that just allows the hardware to do all of this and this is something that I have been talking about for a long time now.

I still think that there is a 100X improvement possible in video card technology over the next several years. The time is coming to pass where we will sell movie-quality games with real time rendering. The problem of course will be the real world vs. toys debate on the technology. Small companies will perhaps deliver card technology that will deliver quality that was previously only available by using high end render farms.

I believe that there is really no reason that we can't do Pixar quality rendering on the new breed of video card accelerators, such as the ATI Radeon 9700 and the NV30, once it is released. All of the Doom III game demos that you saw in the Doom theater were done on the ATI Radeon 9700.

The time is coming where video games and movies are merging. The point is about the game and the designer building the game. I look forward to see what can really be done with the technology. Virtual memory technology for video card memory is going to be the next necessary step.

The Doom III engine will be the engine technology for the next five years once it is released. Once Doom III is completed, I will start working on the next technology and there is a good chance that you will be able to use the same developed content on the next generation engine technology beyond Doom III.