Carmack: Software holding back iPhone

By Tom Bramwell Published 11 June, 2009

But he's going to tell Apple what's what.

Id Software's John Carmack has said that the powerful iPhone is being held back by "software inefficiencies", and that he will soon meet with Apple to advise them on ways to improve the system as a games platform.

"If you look at it in raw hardware horsepower, the iPhone should be better in performance than the Nintendo DS and the PlayStation Portable," he told VentureBeat. "But the truth is, you can't exploit it all because of software inefficiencies."

Carmack has previously criticised Apple's attitude to gaming, telling Eurogamer last year that "Steve Jobs doesn't care about games" because "he's not a gamer".

And while it's good news that one of the industry's smartest programmers is going to advise the company on how to improve, it does call to mind Valve boss Gabe Newell's comments in an interview two years ago with Kikizo, when he said the following:

"We have this pattern with Apple, where we meet with them, people there go 'wow, gaming is incredibly important, we should do something with gaming'. And then we'll say, 'OK, here are three things you could do to make that better', and then they say OK, and then we never see them again.

"And then a year later, a new group of people show up, who apparently have no idea that the last group of people were there, and never follow though on anything."

Given the success of games on the iTunes App Store, perhaps things have changed. Speaking of which, id's Doom game for iPhone, apparently now called Doom Resurrection, is due out next week according to VentureBeat. (Update: Apologies - Resurrection is a separate game derived from Doom III.)

Picture of Tom.

About Tom Bramwell

Tom is Operations director of Eurogamer Network and Editor-at-Large of Eurogamer.net. He joined the company in February 2000.

Read more articles from Tom by visiting the Tom Bramwell archive page.

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Comments (16) Latest comment 3 years ago

Comments threads automatically close after 30 days, but please feel free to continue chatting on the forum!

  • Vice.Destroyer #1 3 years ago

    Raw horsepower might make it an excellent platform, but I somehow am not convinced that a touch-screen is the interface I would enjoy playing anything other than boardgames or turn-based RPG's. Anything requiring precision or against the clock, no interest.

  • NegativeZero #2 3 years ago

    That's my major reservation with the iphone as a gaming platform too - the touch screen + tilt sensor is quite limited. But given how vibrant the whole developer ecosystem is around it, it's probably just a case of developers coming up with creative solutions to use the features. We had similar experiences when the DS launched.

  • Krusty #3 3 years ago

    And take Gabe with you!

  • kestral #4 3 years ago

    This only matters to people making game engines. Everybody else is happy playing the games or making games that look just as good as the competitors (preferably slightly better).
    Edited by 1 at 11/06/09 @ 10:18

  • TwinFire #5 3 years ago

    Got to love Carmack, keeps pushing the boundries

  • StooMonster #6 3 years ago

    Perhaps the inefficiencies are in there to extend battery life?

    Either way, go Carmack … king of the nerd coders!

  • penhalion #7 3 years ago

    Carmack is getting on my nerves these days. First off you can't optimise a bloody phone to play games. It will always have to have some resources dedicated to listening out for incoming calls and then killing or suspending anything you were doing to allow for the call to be answered and have your voice processed.

    I'm pretty sure Carmack will propose some kind of exclusive mode like you get in windows, where everything else stops and all resources get dedicated to the game. That may work on an iTouch but, it would break an iPhone end of story.

  • SwedBear #8 3 years ago

    My main gripe right now for the iPhone as a gaming machine is the battery life. My iPhone has tons of games on it and many of them are really really good (which I never thought would happen so I'm glad to be wrong). However - I've realized that playing most of the games drains my battery really fast unless it really just is a short burst while waiting for the train. In contrast my NDSi (and even the PSPS when I had one) could play for much much longer.

    If the new iPhone really has that much better battery life (and that is not just sucked up by developers using even more features in the games that drain battery) then it might fix this problem but for now - if I expect to do a longer trip I still rather play on my NDSi than on my iPhone. For short burst of gaming the iPhone works greath though (even though I must admit that the majority of games and programs I buy/download kind of never gets played/used after a week or so - not sure why ..).

    On a sidenote I'm hoping the the Android plattform starts getting more similar games as my imported HTC Magic should be here tomorrow :).

    /B

  • Jamieb87 #9 3 years ago

    I'm not even sure that graphical prowess is the be all and end all. As exciting as the prospect of "outperforming the psp" is, I think a few more games with depth would be good as I find many of the games to just be to arcadey. (maybe I expect too much from my phone?) the touch screen needn't be a hindersnce- a port of classic civilization 1 with touchscreen controls would work and would keep me entertained. Despite terrible graphics.

  • penhalion #10 3 years ago

    @SwedBear

    You're pretty much on the money there. Greater use of the graphics chip eats power like a hungry dog eats a piece of meat. That's what pisses me off about Carmack's nonsense. He speaks without thinking or even considering what type of device he's talking about. Primarily the iPhone is a phone. It is constantly in touch with base stations, which takes power. Making a call takes a lot of power as it both needs to transmit and receive etc. etc.

    You can't optimise such a device for games because you can't turn off those parts of the device that make it a phone. What is he going to optimise here. Is he going to suggest some stupid mode where the phone looses the ability to accept incoming calls. You can't even optimise the graphics drivers because they need to run the cocoa interface. You can possibly give the driver two modes and optimise the hell out of the second game specific mode but, then you are into the realms of mode switching, loosing the ability to pull up say the apple keyboard over a game etc. etc.

    From what I can see. He doesn't have a clue about the device he is working on. He is just reacting to the fact that he can't do all the stuff he wants on it and then saying "but the hardware should be able to support more". Yes carmack it does support more. If and only if it doesn't have to do all the other stuff a phone needs to do!

  • JensonJet #11 3 years ago

    I don't have an iPhone myself, but am I right in assuming that like most phones it's battery is removeable? If this is so, then there's a very simple solution to the issue of games using up battery power quickly... buy yourself another battery.

    I always used to carry a spare battery with me when I had a mobile. If it really is that important to you to be contactable, and games are that much of an obsession you need to play them on a phone, then the extra cost of buying a spare battery shouldn't be an issue.
    Edited by 1 at 11/06/09 @ 15:02

  • SwedBear #12 3 years ago

    Jetson: Nope - it's Apple and they clearly loath the idea of a replacable battery :). So it's not possible to put a new battery in.

    penhalion: I'm sure there are some optimizations that can be done, turn off some background tasks while just leaving the most critical (like receiving calls) - if you install one of the memory cleaner apps you see that there are a few processes going on at all time. But I agree - it is definitely not comparable to a PSP or NDS where the hardware can be accessed exclusively. At the same time the iPhone is slowly started to be marketed a bit like a "PSP/NDS-killer" and a games machine so to me there seems to be a bit of a conflict.

  • MENTAL1ST Verified Senior Software Engineer, Picsel UK Ltd. #13 3 years ago

    I think people are missing the point a bit here. It's perfectly possible for an operating system to make writing optimal graphics code impossible without sacrificing battery life or blocking critical background tasks.

    Does anyone remember Windows games coded before DirectX came along? There weren't many, for that exact reason. And DirectX doesn't prevent my PC collecting email or running antivirus checks in the background.

    The fact that Apple have never cared about games much *is* the point, though. But since they sell so many in their app store now, and since improved graphics for games is one of their selling points for iPhone 3GS, now might be the time for them to start taking notice.

  • XBoxDragon #14 3 years ago

    Carmack isn't the only one who has concerns like this, I know that people from rockstar have been to see apple about similar concerns too.

  • Alkeno #15 3 years ago

    TwinFire "Got to love Carmack, keeps pushing the boundries"
    I was just going to write that exact sentence :-)

    The iPhone may not be the ideal platform for hardcore games (battery life, controls) but it's always good news that Carmack is pushing the limits and helping those at Apple to make better programming tools. You can think of it this way: More efficient software can be used for better graphics, but also to make the same graphics as before using less battery.

  • Matthew_Hornet #16 3 years ago

    To all the people complaining about "one arsey games developer": are you guys drunk? It's John "Motherfucking" Carmack! If Carmack says the code isn't optimized, then it is so. The guy writes graphics drivers for fun, ferchrissakes!

    He didn't say anything about shutting off background apps. He said *iPhone's graphics code is badly written, and he wants to help Apple fix it*. By the way, all of you complaining about short battery life should be singing his praises right about now. How do you think badly written code affects battery life?

    You guys know what 'optimizing' means, right?