Mac Gaming News - John Carmack Talks About The Mac & The GeForce3

by , 3:45 PM EST, February 23rd, 2001

After Steve Jobs and John Carmack announced that nVIDIA's GeForce3 would arrive first on the Mac, and that Doom III would support it, John Carmack updated his .plan with some comments on the forthcoming card. A .plan file is something that many game developers use to post comments about their games, the industry, the world, and anything else they feel like. Mr. Carmack, cofounder of ID Software and probably the best 3-D graphics engine programmer ever, piles his adulation onto the GeForce3's new technologies:

The short answer is that the GeForce 3 is fantastic. I haven't had such an impression of raising the performance bar since the Voodoo 2 came out, and there are a ton of new features for programmers to play with.

Graphics programmers should run out and get one at the earliest possible time. For consumers, it will be a tougher call. There aren't any applications our right now that take proper advantage of it, but you should still be quite a bit faster at everything than GF2, especially with anti-aliasing. Balance that against whatever the price turns out to be.

While the Radeon is a good effort in many ways, it has enough shortfalls that I still generally call the GeForce 2 ultra the best card you can buy right now, so nVIDIA is basically dethroning their own product.

Mr. Carmack also confirmed that Doom III will be a MacOS X title:

We do run a bit better on a high end Wintel system, but the Apple performance is still quite good, especially considering the short amount of time that the drivers had before the event.

It is still our intention to have a simultaneous release of the next product on Windows, MacOS-X, and Linux.

Apple has announced that the GeForce3 will be available as a build-to-order (BTO) option in new Macs at the end of March.

The Mac Observer Spin:

John Carmack is basically an action gamer's god, so anything he says is accepted and deconstructed with the gravest attention to detail. That Mr. Carmack both praises the GeForce3 and disparages ATI's Radeon chipset is significant, and will help determine many gamers' purchasing decisions. Couple Mr. Carmack's legendary stature with the incredible first viewing of Doom III at MACWORLD Tokyo, and it looks like nVIDIA and ID Software are both headed for smash hits.

We can't underestimate how much impact this will have on the way PC gamers look at the Mac as well. Mr. Carmack's support for Apple and Mac OS X have become well known to Mac and PC gamers alike. His influence, added to the GeForce3 news, should continue to enhance the Mac's reputation.

John Carmack's .plan Update