John Carmack chooses side in the graphics card war

It is the English edition of PC Gamer that begs the ever-recurring question for SweClocker’s readers. “If you were to buy a graphics card today, what would you choose?” – but not to anyone, but to John Carmack himself.

Founder of Id Software goes out on mined land and chooses side. According to Carmack, it is Nvidia’s support for developers that makes the decision. The fact that AMD in some cases has more powerful graphics cards is of less importance in this context.

Nvidia does have a stronger dev-relations team. I can always drop an email for an obscure question. So its more of a socio-cultural decision there rather than a raw “Which hardware is better.”

Nvidia’s involvement in the gaming industry takes place through the program “The Way It’s Meant To Be Played” where hundreds of employees work to assist game developers with everything from customized tools to testing and optimization. Nvidia also provides access to its own interfaces such as PhysX and CUDA, which make it easier for gamers to take advantage of the computing power of modern Geforce.

The fact that Nvidia is deeply involved in the development process means that Carmack’s games are primarily “polished” for Geforce. However, he adds that modern graphics cards from both AMD and Nvidia are “insanely powerful” and that nowadays it is almost impossible to buy a bad model.

“Integrated graphics inevitable”

At the same time, Carmack takes the opportunity to give its view on the recent development of integrated graphics parts. Both Intel and AMD aim to make separate graphics cards more or less redundant, but not by offering superior performance. Instead, companies’ processors should be good enough at graphics to suffice for the vast majority of uses – including games.

According to Carmack, there is potential already in today’s processors with integrated graphics parts. The latest models can even be faster than game consoles, provided that programmers have freer access to the hardware than is currently the case.

The fact that Nvidia is outside this important market at the same time as sales of separate graphics cards risk falling may have the consequence that the company is forced to cut back on development. Carmack sees this as something that could be “unfortunate for the whole industry”.

The bottom line is that integrated graphics will sooner or later take over. Maybe not in a year or two, but Carmack has a hard time imagining a world in five years where there is no competent graphics in every CPU.