John Carmack says AMD and NVIDIA driver teams often break game optimizations

Speaking at the Oculus Conference earlier this week, famous game developer John Carmack boasted that he's better at optimizing game code than the dedicated video card driver teams that are employed by AMD and NVIDIA. In a passing comment, Carmack lamented that the GPU driver teams often make mistakes that break game optimizations, because they make decisions that aren't always going to be optimal.

Carmack isn't pitching for a job at AMD or Nvidia, though he does have some constructive criticism. According to Carmack, GPU driver teams often make mistakes in driver development that ultimately break optimizations. This is something Carmack feels he can do better than them at the moment. "They often make mistakes," he said, referring to driver updates that can break things. "'Let me do the specific low level things, I know what I'm doing, I'll take care of it, you're going to make decisions that are not going to be optimal for me in various ways," Carmack said.

His remarks were given while talking about various virtual reality technologies, but it's pretty interesting. Full details at PC Gamer.