The quintessential PC game programmer then dropped a bit of a bombshell by announcing that he had recently moved his primary development efforts over to the Xbox 360, and that he expected to continue development there for the next six months—although the PC version of id Software's next game will still be released first. One of his reasons for the move to Xbox 360 for development, Carmack said, was the headache of driver issues on the PC platform. The several layers of abstraction on the PC make it hard to nail down exact graphics performance because the programmer is held at a distance from the hardware. By contrast, the Xbox 360's more direct approach was "refreshing." Carmack also praised Microsoft's development environment as easily the best of any of the consoles, thanks to the company's background as a software provider.
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As for the PS3, he liked sound of the noises Sony has been making about the PlayStation 3 as something of an open platform, and suggested that perhaps an open PS3 could become a computing platform something like the Amiga of old, with an excellent, fixed graphics subsystem. HDTV displays offer the fidelity to make this happen where it couldn't on past consoles.