> By what metric?

His record speaks for itself. I know it is tough to imagine what it was like programming 3D engines meant to run on graphics non-accelerated PCs running DOS, without the internet knowledge or collaboration available to us now, but the stuff he was doing was absolutely revolutionary. He basically created PC gaming as we know it today by creating a market for 3D accelerators and before that by doing it in software very well. He also did this stuff in an record amount of time. From Wolfenstein 3D (1992) to Quake (1995) he made three separate engines which each revolutionized the industry one after the other.

EDIT: The metric I am using is 'impact' in an industry and in society in general -- the impact of Doom and Quake on culture and the adoption of computers and PC gaming and many other things can not be overstated. You can draw a direct line from Doom to Quake to nVidia to CUDA and machine learning if you want.

The closest guy to Carmack today seems to be Brian Caris, who developed virtualized geometry[1], a rasterization based rendering technique where the geometric detail of static objects is adjusted to the screen resolution in real time. There is another talk (can't find it right now) where he mentions Carmack as an inspiration. I wonder what Carmack would be working on today if he was still in the game engine business.

[1] https://advances.realtimerendering.com/s2021/Karis_Nanite_SI...

There's some really big innovations happening in e.g. rendering like that; I wouldn't be surprised if the complexity and work involved in just Nanite is 10x that of the whole Quake engine.

Similarly there's the work nvidia is doing, using AI technology to upscale graphics instead of rendering things at 4K.

Hobbyists have already made their own implementation of Nanite. It's not that complicated.

It has been over a year since the algorithm has been explained in quite a bit of detail.

Hobbyists make complicated things quite regularly, although I don't know about 10x quake.

10x a quake for modern hardware, maybe (could be quite simple)

10x software rendered dos quake with loads of asm, probably not.

In that sense, neither is the quake engine.

The idea is that, the derivative came after the virtuoso. Of course what came after is more complex costs more takes more is more impressive blah blah. Dismissing those that thought the thought or solved for a problem before it was, is such a dumb thing people do.

He was a little bit. I wonder what he was up at meta before switching to agi

VR headsets.

Who made DLSS? Using ML to denoise ray tracing is massive.

I think DLSS doesn't do denoising. DLSS uses an ML algorithm to upscale frames using additional information like z buffer and motion vectors. Denoising is used to drastically reduce the number of required rays for ray tracing. I would guess denoising is done first, using a non-ML algorithm, and DLSS is done afterwards.

DLSS does the denoising since DLSS 1.0 see the DLSS announcement https://www.youtube.com/live/4_g_Y0W1Xn8?feature=share (pardon the crappy gaming channel, it looks like Nvidia weren’t running their own YouTube the time)

It adds frames since I think 3.0.

That's odd, since you can use ray tracing without DLSS. I'm very sure it uses denoising even then.

There may be some confusion between upscaling and denoising. You might notice I keep editing my comment because it’s really really hard to find old Nvidia release announcements.

Update: https://youtu.be/6O2B9BZiZjQ looks good around 3:54

Excellent summary

An interesting read into some of the insights that Carmack had which lead to the revolution that was Quake can be found in the "Ramblings in Realtime" articles[1] by Michael Abrash[2], who helped John develop Quake's 3D engine. Abrash wrote the rather famous "Graphics Programming Black Book", now available for free[3].

[1]: https://valvedev.info/archives/abrash/

[2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Abrash

[3]: https://github.com/jagregory/abrash-black-book

I remember he dropped Doom 3 on us with fully dynamic lighting and shadows in like fucking 2004 or something. I remember getting my hands on the engine leak (in 2003?) and absolutely getting my mind blown to see shadows dancing on the wall (at like 8 FPS on my athlonXP geforce4 rig) at something resembling real-time, in the same map that was used at the Apple developer demo where Steve Jobs announced mac support.

All of Carmack's engines were YEARS ahead of their time. Everyone was doing baked lighting and employing various gimmicks for dynamic-looking shadows, and this dude (and his team) comes in and destroys everyone with this fully-, actually-dynamic lighting system. I don't think anyone else even came close until Crysis in 2007.

If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.

2001 macworld demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=80guchXqz14

> If that isn't a top 10 programmer performance than I don't know what is.

Nobody's saying he isn't brilliant. But it's not possible to declare him as a "top 10" programmer without actually taking into account all the other programmers.

I think there are at least 10 other programmers that you've never heard of, but that have had as much or more impact on society in general as Carmack did.

Isn't it enough to just say he's brilliant? Ranking programmers is a fool's errand and serves no purpose other than to devalue other brilliant programmers.

(Also, I think measuring how brilliant someone is by how much impact they've had on society doesn't make much sense. Those are two entirely different things.)

I don't think anyone here means top 10 in a strict ranking sense of the phrase. But I think Carmack very easily has a place amongst the pantheon of programming gods, whether you measure by 'brilliance' (whatever that means) or impact. He has done a ridiculous amount of innovation over the years, and set the pace for game engine and real-time rendering development for something like 20 years.

> I think Carmack very easily has a place amongst the pantheon of programming gods, whether you measure by 'brilliance' (whatever that means) or impact.

I guess? I don't know. There are so many programmers that have had a much greater overall impact and such than Carmack has (which in no way takes away from Carmack's accomplishments!) that I find it hard to say either way.

That's part of why I think trying to rank people is a bit strange. I doubt that there is even much consensus on what it takes to be a "programming god" in the first place.

But I do agree that Carmack is great!

Like who? I can think of Brian Kernighan, Dennis Ritchie, Linux Torvalds, Steve Wozniak, Ada Lovelace, Grace Hopper, Richard Stallman, Edsger Dijkstra, Bill Gates, John Carmack. Maybe Alan Turing. With the exception of the real OG's I think Carmack fits in that list quite nicely.

..and hundreds or thousands of others, that signed some NDA, worked on e.g. mission-critical systems (where bugs as the ones discussed here would cost you your job) and who never got to show their work, which is OP's point.

I mean, if you are going to be culturally impactful, I think the most important prerequisite is that you are allowed to talk about what you create...

Agreed, but then we should differentiate between "best" and "most famous"

Hell no. As skilled as Carmack is as a coder, he falls well below the pioneers for early operating systems and programming language compilers and development in terms of industry and societal impact. Even Bricklin's VisiCalc and its descendants resulting in boring old modern spreadsheet software has a better claim to lasting societal impact than Carmack's 3D engines.

> The metric I am using is 'impact' in an industry and in society in general

If you correlate against lines of code written over a lifetime then John Brunner and Vernor Vinge bubble to the top. They're my go-to examples for people who think that literature reviews "don't matter".

Kind of a fun exercise since we get to see all the different values out there in the world.

Amount of tickets closed on JIRA lmaoo

Please no. I know it's a joke, but please.

I know, the truth hurts

LoC, the ultimate metric

I don't think a deep analysis is required here. It is quite obvious that he'll not be the top-10 programmer on every single metric that one can imagine.

He's very good. Enough people agree. I recommend letting it at that.

Impact. He pretty much invented the FPS genre by reading a paper about Z buffers from some guy in the Navy, IIRC. All the Call Duty kiddies owe him a debt. Who knows how long it would have taken for that whole genre to get going without him?

He popularised BSP for FPS which meant doom ran faster than SystemShock, despite having more complex level geometry

Was Doom's geometry more complex? No room over room, no slopes, vertical axis was awkward. Feels like apples and oranges, even before considering the gameplay was also very distinct between them.

All true. SystemShock also have 3-D models for some objects too.

I guess a better way of putting it would’ve been the SystemShock would have run a lot faster if it had BSP.