ame Informer met with id Software’s John Carmack and Todd Hollenshead to talk about, well, a lot of things. In our hour-long talk, we talked about the state of PC gaming, QuakeCon and the pros and cons of developing for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360. We’ve split the interview into two digestible chunks. Part one appears here today, and we’ll run the conclusion tomorrow. Enjoy.

Game Informer: First off, I just want to say congratulations on the awards. [John Carmack was just presented with a Technology Emmy award at CES for his work in 3D game engines, and id Software earned an Emmy for the company’s rendering work.]

John Carmack: It still seems kind of a bizarre thing. I mean, whenever you hear Emmys and Oscars and stuff, you think high fashion and Hollywood, and that is so not what I’m about at all. And being honored with that--it’s certainly one of the big-time honors that you’re not going to turn down or are not going to step away from--but I never would have expected to receive something like this.

GI: After Enemy Territories: Quake Wars ships with the highly modified Doom 3 engine and the MegaTexture support, is it time for you guys to move on from that engine?

Carmack: Yes, the in-house development project that we’ve been working on is all new technology. It still has some roots in the Doom 3 technology, but almost everything is new in there. We’re still not talking about exactly what the project is, but it’s a new IP, it’s diverting a little bit from the standard id formula and it’s not just a first-person shooter. Technically, it’s build around an advancement over the MegaTexture technology from Quake Wars. Where that was applied just to the terrain, the version of the new technology applies it into everything, so we can have that level of rich detail on all the surfaces on the entire world. That’s the push that we’re making with graphics technology. The gameplay is somewhat different from anything that we’ve of done before. The company is pursuing Wolfenstein, Doom and Quake franchises with other partner developers and all, but we’re trying to develop a brand-new franchise with this new one. Hopefully, we’ll be talking about that sometime this year, and we’ll be able to go ahead and come out of our own little cone of silence about it.

GI: Do you think that’ll be at E3 or maybe the next QuakeCon?

Carmack: I would certainly expect by the next QuakeCon, but…when is E3 this year?

GI: July

Carmack: [pauses] I don’t know. That’s a toss-up. It kind of depends on what the business relationships and stuff are at that point.

GI: Are you planning on adopting DX10 for Quake Wars?

Carmack: Not for Quake Wars, for sure. It has come up as a question for our internal development projects, and we weren’t even expecting to ask that question. There’s no massive pull for me for DX10. It would be more a question of if we don’t think we’re going to get done until Vista is broadly adopted, it might just save us development and support things to say it’s a DX10 game--but there’s no huge thing where we’re dying to use any particular DX10 feature. It would just more be a question about practically, is the market there where we can write off everything else? Quake Wars is definitely not DX10.

GI: Since you’re moving ahead with the new technology within the Doom 3 engine, you’re not worried about adopting that for DX10?

Carmack: No, because the DX9 stuff—actually, DX9 is really quite a good API [application programming interface] level. Even with the D3D [Direct3D] side of things, where I know I have a long history of people thinking I’m antagonistic against it. Microsoft has done a very, very good job of sensibly evolving it at each step--they’re not worried about breaking backwards compatibility--and it’s a pretty clean API. I especially like the work I’m doing on the 360, and it’s probably the best graphics API as far as a sensibly designed thing that I’ve worked with.

GI: A lot of gamers are in the boat right now--and I’m in the boat as well--where they’re saving money to buy a new rig. I was at QuakeCon two years ago with my computer, and I was just slow. So I’ve been saving cash to buy a new rig to handle the next-gen of PC games. Quake Wars, Spore and Crysis are all coming out on the horizon, and there’s a big push for PC games this year. Do you think gamers should take the plunge now for DX10, or do you think they should wait and stick with DX9.

Carmack: I don’t think that there’s any huge need for people to jump right now. All the high-end video cards right now—video cards across the board—are great nowadays. This is not like it was years ago, where they’d say, “This one’s poison, stay away from this. You really need to go for this.” Both ATI and Nvidia are going a great job on the high end. Internally, we’re still using more Nvidia cards, but it’s not necessarily because we’ve done a careful analysis and we decided that they’re superior in some way. They have better OpenGL support, but they’re all good cards right now. Personally, I wouldn’t jump at something like DX10 right now. I would let things settle out a little bit and wait until there’s a really strong need for it. I doubt there’s going to be any radical, obvious sweet spot where it’s like, “Now is the time to go get things.” It’s fairly mature, the pace that things are going on, and I don’t expect there’s going to be any huge sea changes in the way things are moving.

GI: Is there anything in particular that you’d suggest if someone was going to be going out and buying a new computer right now that they should make sure they get in their new rig?

Carmack: You know, not really. I think that while there are still points of differentiation between the different qualities of things both in graphics and processor and all that, it’s hard to go wrong nowadays. The prices are so low relative to where things used to be and the performance is great. People can still screw up and buy a computer with no expandability or get stuck with some integrated graphics card on the motherboard or things like that, but it’s been a long time since we’ve cared enough about the exact performance stuff to go and make exhaustive benchmarks on all the different things that we’ve done. I mean, the latest Intel processors are really fast, and we do find them pretty much top of the line. Jan Paul has done a lot of benchmarking for various compression and decompression things, and it is kind of neat going around benchmarking on the 360 and the different Intel processors and comparing everything, and Intel’s done a really great job with the latest generation of things. It’s funny from my position, but I’m not all that deeply into the latest and greatest nitty-gritty details between the different things on there. Maybe with the length of perspective that I’ve had, it’s not all that incredibly important--especially when we’re looking at a four-year game-development title again. If I go and say, “Right now, this is absolutely the best thing, two years from now it’s not going to matter.” If I ever see anything where I think someone could make a really tragic mistake, like there was something out there that probably wouldn’t be a good thing to buy into, I would warn people off.