Though it looks like more games are making the leap from PCs to mobile – like the rumoured League of Legends mobile version – it sounds like the platform probably won’t ever quite match up to high-end videogaming PCs in terms of technological might. That’s according to computer programmer, videogame dev, and Oculus CTO John Carmack, who’s talked to podcaster Joe Rogan about the future of mobile and PC technology.
Carmack said to YouTube show The Joe Rogan Experience, “I make the point to people that we are so used to computers just getting faster and faster, and they have for decades and decades – our entire life, basically. But we are approaching the end of that”.
He added that “while we’ve still got a lot more power to come, the next decade’s still going to be good, it is very likely, barring some magical new technology which – fingers crossed – maybe we get, but you will probably never get the cellphone technology to the point that a modern gaming PC is.”
Carmack continued, saying “one the one hand, [this] sounds like ‘obviously, that’s a different thing’, but on the other hand, if you’ve been here through this million x increase in performance, it’s a little bit of a downer to think that, no, we just can’t wait another ten years and we’ll have everything we could do there available in the systems.”
Talking about the future of PC and mobile technology, Carmack said “we are approaching the limits of what’s going to be happening with that, so you have to be better. You have to be a more conscientious developer, you have to start paying attention to all of the different aspects of performance that, on a PC, you can still largely gloss over.”
You catch more of Carmack’s in-depth – and really interesting – discussion about this topic in the podcast video above (around the 1:03:45 mark).
It sounds, then, that unless that “magical” new tech comes along, high-end videogaming PCs’ technology could continue to edge out the mobile’s, at least for the foreseeable future.