John Carmack Interview: GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing and Voxels and more! - PC Perspective
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- čas přidán 8. 06. 2024
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Last week we were in Dallas, Texas covering Quakecon 2011 as well as hosting our very own PC Perspective Hardware Workshop. While we had over 1100 attendees at the event and had a blast judging the case mod contest, one of the highlights of the event is always getting to sit down with John Carmack and pick his brain about topics of interest. We got about 30 minutes of John's time over the weekend and pestered him with questions about the GPU hardware race, how Intel's intergrated graphics (and AMD Fusion) fit in the future of PCs, the continuing debate about ray tracing, rasterization, voxels and infinite detail engines, key technologies for PC gamers like multi-display engines and a lot more!
One of our most read articles of all time was our previous interview with Carmack that focused a lot more on the ray tracing and rasterization debate. If you never read that, much of it is still very relevant today and is worth reading over.
This year though John has come full circle on several things including ray tracing, GPGPU workloads and even the advantages that console hardware has over PC gaming hardware. - Věda a technologie
This guy is legend. A true walking encyclopaedia about technology and programming.
Unusually competent interviewer. With standard "durr, what game are you going to do next" questions we would have never gotten these deep trains of thought and anecdotes from Carmack. Great job!
yeah but man we totally would have
Put some respect on "the interviewer" Mark Zuckerberg's name
Anyone watching this in 2020?
His predictions of Ray tracing were pretty spot on
2022 here. still very interesting to listen!
2024, his thoughts on ARM CPUs for consoles is more poignant than ever!
18:48 "I don't think the notion of infinite detail is actually all that important, it's more important to get the broad strokes of the artistic vision in there and if you take uninspired content and can look at that down to the molecular level it's still uninspired content". Wise words.
2011 and he already know everything about ray traycing in the future , such a Boss .
He was implementing Ray tracing 8 years ago just on software at 720p 60 fps, the bloke is a legend.
Truly pushing the limit of the technical side of video games.
Dude, computers ran Ray Tracing back in 1968. The idea and mathematics of it as well as computers rendering it has been around for 40 YEARS at the time of this interview LOL.
@@EvoPortal he was talking about running in real time, ray tracing has been around for decades but it wasnt in real time, usually would take hours just to render a frame
@@banguseater It was realtime. Could be done way back when it was invented. The graphical fidelity however.... Anything really exceptional quality still takes hours if not days if you want it detailed enough.
It depends on actual raytracing vs path tracing, number of bounces, number of rays, etc.
I'm not a programmer but god dammit, it doesn't matter what you do, this guy is an absolute inspiration.
Steve Z
Agreed he has contributed so much to mankind. Playing Doom 3 at the moment.
Watching in 2020. He's sitting there predicting ray tracing and VR. Very cool!
...while wearing a quake 2 shirt that just now has ray tracing.
@@DaRealKing303 so true, lol!
Ray tracing has been around forever, just not in real-time.
Andy CQ DX unbelievable predictions as usual - not only predicts Oculus, but builds the first one for fun, gives them the exposure they need and then gets on board to steer the ship as CTO. A few years designing and building some of the most impressive and efficient rockets Ive ever seen, after of course inventing the FPS genre and giving Valve their leg up in the industry with the quake engine. An absolute legend.
27:02 - foreshadowing Carmack's entry into the world of VR development!
gia VRで失敗パールマ君はお宅
He's so ridiculously well articulated. Dude goes on like a rap god with overwhelming clarity on such complex subjects. What a beast.
Its his unique skill, Carmack literally talks 3 hours full technical with there are 3 hours of worth problems to solve, so clearly
Its always nice to hear Carmacks Opinion , such a knowledgeable gentleman and very humble too.
It is Carmack, hard to not just sit and nod as he lays down the knowledge.
Good to see Mark Zuckerburg taking time off Facebook to do interviews.
Mark Zuckerburg is so lost
John Jackson zuckerburg wishes he could code like carmack: the nerd god
Eatmyass r/wooosh lol
I think he was talking about the interviewer, guys...
This man might be humanity’s only hope and I’m not even on some meme shit. He’s truly invested in people’s best interest and the amount of power he can “render” in brain is phenomenal. True legand
John Cormack is an absolute beast. He is on an entirely new level.
The father of FPS. Its safe to say that most FPS engines nowadays are some kind of variations of Q1 engine.
please write his name right :S
Faroskalin carmack lol but yeah u r right.
This 32 minute interview is like listening to an entire semester in college about graphics programming.
such a badass Dev John, you know you dont waste your time when listening an interview with Carmack. amazing guy!
John Carmack's gift seems to be to take knowledge available to everybody and do extraordinary things with it. His mental processing would be fascinating to observe.
You forgot that he gives back as well. Look at all the engines he released as source code for the general public. Look at what others have done with that knowledge. This guy is a programming legend.
+Kyle Reece Indeed!
@Jeffrey Haines yeah and you had his mental processes and natural talent
20:10 Carmack determines ray tracing is the way forward
Seriously man,this dude is from another world.
thats a man that loves his profession if i have ever seen one
Love these interviews and content, always fun catching up on these on my spare time.
Carmack while answering to questions, he just wrote the book with title "GPU Race, Intel Graphics, Ray Tracing and Voxels and more!"
This is the most information dense youTube video I can remember watching.
Just hearing John talk at 4:15 about the problems they have with drawing graphics fast enough and the solutions he'd like to see, and then realising it became way way worse over the years, with now the tragedy called OpenCL to boot... We give great minds so much hassle to do their magic and improve the world. But he's a trooper for continuing in the business and keeping an open, playful mind. It's inspiring to keep control of your own happiness and not let all these incompetent programmers take away your joy.
This guy predicts the future very well!
Great interview, thanks a lot for doing it. Always awesome to hear Carmack talk about, well, just about anything.
Wow. Carmack is truly incredible. Not only can you tell he really knows what he's talking about he's incredibly fluent in verbalizing his thoughts - to me that seems really difficult especially with all the complex topics he talks about. He doesn't even have to think about what he's just been asked even though that guy poses long ass questions ... I take my hat off to you, Mr. Carmack
I think you are severely underestimating the difficulty of taking one 4084x4084 texture and being able to split and load different parts of it into memory without needing to store 800+ mb of stuff in RAM. To get that working on current-gen hardware was seriously impressive. To get it running at 60 fps, with models and particle effects and animations and AI on top of that, is simply astounding. We can go back and forth over the benefits of megatextures, but you cannot deny the team's talent.
Video is icing, sound is the heart of the interview and its perfect. Thanks for posting!
For a second there I thought: "Why is Mark Zuckerberg interviewing John Carmack?"
Same. However, you quickly realize that this guy displays too much animation to be the lizardman himself.
What I love about Carmack is that he is a PURE old school nerd... devoted like hell with what he loves doing and doesn't care about anything else. Unlike "modern nerds" who follow nerd trends and so on...
He already knew what I slowly came to understand recently 7 years ago.
John Carmack could be talking about how he would do my mom and i would still listen.
Wtf lol
Great insights from Carmac!
I think the test for Vulcan maturity is hearing him give a different talk in each ear and answering questions on both at once whilst listening
Lol
And the amazing thing is, we be unstoppable listening machines seeing him!
Thanks PCPer. I could listen to a J. Carmack podcast all day long if it were out there. Love to read all his reviews.
You guys are doing great productions. Great video quality. My only comment is that you consider getting come lighting tools like a bouncing board.
Thanks guys for this. Brilliant!
24:40 a decade later and UE5 has Nanite which does kind of what John Carmack is saying wasn't available back then.
Exactly, if he was around, we could maybe have gotten Virtualized Geometry sooner than UE5.
Maybe not a shocker, but he predicted the move to ARM processors and ray-tracing (well.. he said analytic ray-tracing. We're using stochastic ray-tracing which is even better)
"Proceduralism is really just a truly crappy form of data compression" 18:15
10 Years a go Carmack had a Raytracing Game Engine built for himself. Nothing more to say here
Not that carmack isn't an amazing programmer but raytracing is nothing new, it has been used all the way back in the 80's for animated scenes by pixar, and in the early 2000's there was already realtime raytracing albeit with low vertice count scenes.
Nvidia just made their hardware good for the specific computations that happen within the process of raytracing, raytracing was already a well known and well utilized concept within the production and animation. The only thing new was that nvidia made it run acceptably in realtime.
@Naeddyr We did have VERY poor lighting for this and tried to fix it in post - these are the results.
Although this is the first time I have even been called CG. Ha!
Great interview. I thought the interviewer did a nice job! Asked concise interesting questions and let John Carmack finish his answers without interruption.
just think about it
they were already thinking about implementing RT in 2011 (implementing in games of course)
Brilliant interview!
This is the 2nd time I've ever seen of Carmack talk and I'm now a fan. He comes across as very knowledgeable about tech but even though he uses a lot of technical terms that go far over my head, he still has a good way of still putting broad ideas of computer functions into terms that people can understand. The way the talks about actual usefulness in games is more informative than I've heard from any company boasting about specs and features. He like an interpreter for computer language.
Fantastic interview with two very intelligent people. I didn't know of Carmack's aspirations for HMDs stemmed this early on. He was right, the immersion of a HMD is revolutionary. Too bad we are entering another lull in HMD development. It's amazing to see how far GPUs have come since this interview and seemingly solved some issues mentioned here.
He predicted the Nintendo Switch and nVidea Shield! (ARM cores with dedicated gpu cores!)
I love interviews with Carmack :) He does all the talking, and that's what I'm interested in, so WIN
very interresting, thx for the vid. btw, how many times does he say "on there" ??
Such a visionar....
The thing I love the most about Carmack is the fact that he doenst dumb anything down. His mind deffinently on a whole different level.
Very nice interview here. John Carmack knows his stuff.
No idea what he was talking about but I enjoyed listening to it :)
I loved that. The interviewer had no fucking idea what he was talking about with that first mathematics question. So he just let him talk and said "cool" at the end.
Basically, mathematics for video games is not any more complicated than what you learnt at school - geometry, algebra, etc. - but it's all about the application of it.
Realising, for example, that you can get a good enough approximation with a simpler method that runs ten times faster than the mathematically precise version.
If he's not the archetype image of the geek, I don't know who is! :)
The thing that I love is how he focuses on technology and not gimmicks and tries to(and succeeds more often than not) to move the industry forward single-handedly.
And it's just cool to listen to an intelligent guy for a change.
Quake II shirt. Badass.
This guy is just so open with his knowledge. It inspires me as a programmer that he is willing to share what he knows. How about ray-trace lighting? It will instantly produces accurate shading and shadows in the environment if the polygon count is high enough. It will wreck the CPU, but maybe one day GPU's will be able to handle them. Guess we'll have to wait another 20 years.
id tech 6 that's being used with the new doom apparently is using raytrace lighting, so more like 5-6 years from this interview date instead of 20. it's like carmack said here, in relation to the mega textures, when the first tests came up for it the stability wasn't there to be used in real time AAA titles, but 5 years later they had it working in rage. so the fact carmack was working on raytracing at this time it makes sense to think a game that might be coming out in 2016 or later will be using the first examples of raytracing.
liam cuthbert I don't think CPU's are capable of doing ray-trace lighting. You would need a powerful, dedicated CPU to attempt that. They're still using baked shadows for large scenes and soft(stencil/texture) shadows where necessary. If the new Doom is like Doom 3, with small areas, then maybe. with enough optimization. But definitely not large scenes. OpenGL can't even support more than 9 lights in a scene, so that doesn't inspire confidence in hardware capability.
FPGA Custom processors are showing good progress in running ray tracing engines in real time. Unless intel amd and nvidia implement custom hardware accelerated circuitry on their processors die , i dont see ray tracing taking off anytime soon. (on general computing scenarios )
I have seen a demo last year of a company (can recall the name) custom FPGA card running a modest Real time ray tracing demo with nice reflections and very accurate shadows running at around 30 to 40 fps , but the level of polygons was limited to 1 million , which thinking about it , is about the level of Poly detail of an average Dreamcast game cast back in 2000.
Even with custom hardware , Ray tracing still has a long way to go , more R&D is needed , just like 3D Acceleration back in the Early 90'S.
Imagination technologies (curiously the maker of the original Dreamcast GPU) recently acquired a company called caustic , and with this came Ray tracing hardware and software expertise. ( openRL API).
Once a BIG company like Nvidia adquires a similar company and invests on making this tech native to their hardware , then the others will tryto catch up..and maybe then , we will have a real chance of seeing Ray tracing effects on regular games. (Competition benefits us all)
As of now , ray tracing is nothing more than a pretty way to render 3D movies on expensive Render Farms.
Gray Fox Yup.
Gray Fox I'm not sure what raytracing gains from reconfigurable hardware. It's data structure traversal with basic geometric operations. It seems you would gain the most if you got really simple CPUs, slapped a tiny specialized SIMD like that on it (hey, look, Dreamcast's SH-4 SIMD unit does exactly THAT and nothing else! 4-float vector multiply-accumulate, dot multiply, vector length estimation), made a shit-megaton of those, gave them a ton of common memory, and taught it to hide latency by switching tasks (unlike Cell). You can see, Intel Larrabee and CUDA fit into the picture...
But perhaps polygons aren't the right approach when you speak of raytracing. Perhaps 1 Mio primitives is really more than plenty, perhaps we need only 200 000 primitives but make each of them more complex.
Regarding Infinite-Detail, Ryan is referring to Point cloud rendering by Euclideon,right?
They’ve called it infinite detail for some reason(marketing-speak?),but its still based on finite resolution,discrete geometry(64points/mm^3 from their vid)so I'm not sure John's response is relevant.
He's referring to vector/spline rendering which is resolution independent/procedural,while theirs is a discrete method that they say enables vast amounts of data to be displayed (but not infinite).
am I wrong?
Awesome interview hard to keep up with Carmack though
First sec. in, I was convinced he was interviewed by Mark Zuckerberg :D
It's a common mistake. (Or is it a mistake?)
I love watching interviews with John Carmack. I want his brain
wearing the quake II shirt like a BOSS
oh i forgot ... HE IS :)
1 Year later. John Carmack is right. I was surprised by the $400 Toshiba Intel i5 Win8 laptop with integrated HD4000 I just got my little nephew for x’mas. Many of the new modern games such as BF3, Farcry3, and Guild Wars 2 are quite playable and enjoyable on his little laptop.
Has anything changed over the last more than 10 years since this interview was taken?
interesting this thing about voxels
I love that JC is wearing a QII t-shirt:D
I agree completely, they definitely work in entirely different fields. It's just that when I think "Geniuses in the video game industry", John Carmack, Hideo Kojima, and Shigeru Miyamoto come to mind.
Great interview, and great shirt... but the end made me kinda sad ;(.. 31:45 After following through over time and doing more with these things I do notice they're there, eg; Quake Champions... wah cry wah.
Can't wait until he gets his robot legs. That's gonna be so cool.
Interesting to hear him pre-emptively talk about Oculus Rift in this interview.
I want that Quake 2 shirt so badly.
29:15 64bit only tools
Am I the only one seeing Mark Zuckerberg as the interviewer!?!
Ryan is a human version of Zuck.
On there
on there.
John obviously loves this topic - and that's why he's a great programmer. That's why anyone is ever great at anything, when they have a genuine love, passion, and interest in the subject. Only in those rare circumstances, do we see true "genius", which isn't even really genius, it's just a kid at heart who absolutely loves what he's doing.
Sick quake 2 shirt
I could listen to Carmack, all day.
What kind of microphones did you use? The audio sounds like ass mixed with garbage. Please let me know the make/model of the mics. Thank you.
I remember when Carmack talked about the advantages of (at least) 16bit float arithmetics in GPUs ("take some alpha layers, a bunch of light sources, and feel like back in 8bit colorland..."), and now 32bits are standard. May his statement gave this development a push? It may be important which questions are raised and which ideas are expressed to give development a good direction.
ITS OVER 9000!!!
yeah, that was a great moment :D
Let me make this simple. I learn't how to build a PC in an afternoon but have been programming for over three years now and having read a book about much of the work Carmack has done on his games seriously doubt I will ever come even close to his level of ability in programming.
Dayum how this intver hung with his dude and asked intelligent follow ups was awesome.
that sounds good to me too , but dont forget the detail of "number of iterations" ...
I do know a bit about 3D graphics programming and I still fail to see a huge step forward. Most of the tech for displaying Rage level is already present in Q1, except streaming. Take Quake lightmap (which is unique for all surfaces in the level) make it the main diffuse texture, make texcoords 32-bit, split texture into blocks and stream them from disk, make LRU cache with coord translation for actual textures rendered by videocard (cache subsystem is also present in Q1). Spend few weeks. Done.
He was right about Ray Tracing.
I’d love to hear what he has to say about the PS5 and how PCs can compete in the future.
I didnt expect anything from the gameplay itself really. And i really see it as an experiment thing. Changing the way people think about how 3d games should be rendered. Heck, he even managed to get AMD to make an extension to do partially what he wanted.. that is quite a big thing. If you've listened to the explanation, there are a lot of issues on the PC that they came accross with rage. He's not going to be able to do much more until these are addressed. This helps gpu vendors with ideas too.
Ah, okay. I don't know if you fiddled with it at all when it was updated, but they added some more graphical options, and you can increase the texture detail a fair bit with them.
I thought you might have been having some pop-in issues, or something. The textures are at least as detailed as the upper average game I find. Some other games may have much crisper ones, but it's decent... The extra detail in odd places and the uniqueness of the textures are really cool though!
@avnertishby they call it infinite detail because you can have a dataset of a rock of 'unlimited detail' down to an atomic level for example, and the engine can still render it because it only renders your monitor's resolution of pixels.
John Carmack seems to have a great passion for graphical programming though and he's clearly enjoying it. I could listen to him talk all day as he clearly knows what he's talking about. I imagine he does a fair bit of rubber duck programming as a result.
Rage can even be considered a step back from Quake 1. Q1 had unique baked raytraced lightmap, dynamically combined with reusable diffuse maps and also with dynamic point lights, cached, displayed. Rage has unique baked texture pre-combined with baked raytraced lighting without dynamic light, streamed, cached, displayed. See what I mean?
no problem.
Well considering he's been doing this stuff since more or less the dawn of PC gaming and that he has practically invented some of the stuff that modern games are based on it's probably pretty safe to say that he can outmanouver most people in a conversation or debate about this kinda stuff :)
2021 squad
12:08 Holy crap that's a lot of threads