id Software Rage Ported to iPhone 4, Runs 60fps

By Marcus Yam
published

Very impressive stuff from inside John Carmack's pocket.

The big surprise that John Carmack teased about earlier today was revealed during his keynote at QuakeCon 2010.

We all know about how well the id Tech 5 engine runs Rage on the Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC, but Carmack pulled another platform out of his pocket to demonstrate the new megatexture engine – the iPhone 4.

The big stunner is that the game is able to run on the iPhone 4's A4 chip at a full 60 frames per second, while featuring several lighting effects that we associate with modern GPUs. Even more impressive is that Carmack said that the id Tech 5 engine even runs acceptably well on the original iPhone 2G – not just the beefier CPU and GPUs of the 3GS and newer.

Incredibly, Carmack said that the id Tech 5 engine even when running on the iPhone could "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2." How's that for amazing progress?

Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam
Marcus Yam served as Tom's Hardware News Director during 2008-2014. He entered tech media in the late 90s and fondly remembers the days when an overclocked Celeron 300A and Voodoo2 SLI comprised a gaming rig with the ultimate street cred.
75 Comments Comment from the forums
  • mauller07
    Incredibly, Carmack said that the id Tech 5 engine even when running on the iPhone could "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2." How's that for amazing progress?

    well herpa derpa derp, the iphone 4 has dual 1ghz processors, and i would not be suprised if the graphics chip was also beefier than the xbox and ps2's
    Reply
  • kikireeki
    One of the most disappointing surprises!
    Reply
  • THEfog101
    It annoy's me why this tech is always being demo'ed on a inferior platform to that of Android, yes it has a apple logo, yes you can download like 100,000 fart apps and yes you can claim that its icons do not look like they were manufactured by Mattel but the truth is that Android is the future. well what were you expecting apple, that A Closed source platform could ever really beat a open source platform, its a little thing called the future.
    Reply
  • Vladislaus
    mauller07Incredibly, Carmack said that the id Tech 5 engine even when running on the iPhone could "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2." How's that for amazing progress?well herpa derpa derp, the iphone 4 has dual 1ghz processors, and i would not be suprised if the graphics chip was also beefier than the xbox and ps2's The iPhone doesn't use a dual processor or a dual core processor. It's a single CPU, single core Cortex-A8. No one besides apple knows the clock speed but it's rumored to be 800 MHz. Of course is still superior to the Emotion Engine on the PS2 that is clocked at 295 MHz, or the Pentium III based CPU on the Xbox that is clocked at 733MHz. The iPhone 4 has 512 MB of memory vs the 64 MB on the Xbox and 40 MB on the PS2.
    Reply
  • Yes but at what resolution?
    Reply
  • r0x0r
    LOOKS great, but playing an FPS using a touch-screen...

    Yeah, I think I'll pass.
    Reply
  • r0x0r
    SmochinaMoron, Android is the dumbest **** ever created. It runs crappy java apps and only few of the Android phones can actually come close to an Iphone, most of them are just stupid low memory, dumb cpus made by the worst mobile manufacturers in the world, who can't even make a decent touchscreen.
    Now now Steve Jobs, there's no need for such anger. We know it's you, and we're not buying your phone until you fix it and let us use it the way we want to.
    Reply
  • Vladislaus
    SmochinaMoron, Android is the dumbest *** ever created. It runs crappy java apps and only few of the Android phones can actually come close to an Iphone, most of them are just stupid low memory, dumb cpus made by the worst mobile manufacturers in the world, who can't even make a decent touchscreen.
    Actually the top of the line Android phones have better hardware than the iPhone. The top of the line Android uses the same CPUs, GPUs and memory that the iPhone use with the exception that iPhone CPU is clocked at about 800 MHz where as the Android phones are clocked at 1 GHz.

    I also don't know if you know this but the iPhone LCD/Touchscreen is made by Samsung not Apple.
    Reply
  • I think the real issue when comparing Android to iPhone is that the iPhone has standard hardware, which is easy to target. With Android, you could be running on any random configuration, which adds a lot of checks, fallbacks, and exception handling into the code base. This makes the port to iPhone cleaner than dealing with Android...
    Reply
  • Wheat_Thins
    SmochinaMoron, Android is the dumbest **** ever created. It runs crappy java apps and only few of the Android phones can actually come close to an Iphone, most of them are just stupid low memory, dumb cpus made by the worst mobile manufacturers in the world, who can't even make a decent touchscreen.
    QQ Moar Apple Fanboy.
    Reply