Carmack claims the PS3 and Xbox 360 have tons of life left, but developers say otherwise – who’s right?

In a recent interview with Wired, id Software founder and CTO of Oculus, John Carmack, gave a rather startling opinion on the current state of the PS3 and Xbox 360. According to Carmack, he’s often struggled with leaving the low end of gaming behind, even when he decided that Doom would require a VGA adapter and a 386.

“[T]here’s so much you can still do on the previous console generation. The 360 and PS3 are far from tapped out in terms of what a developer could do with them, but the whole world’s gonna move over towards next-gen and high-end PCs and all these other things,”Carmack told Wired. ”Part of me still frets a little bit about that, where just as you fully understand a previous generation, you have to put it away to kind of surf forward on the tidal wave of technology that’s always moving.”

That’s a little surprising to hear, given that Naughty Dog — creators of the hugely successful and gorgeous PS3 game, The Last of Us,” have said that they pushed the PS3 to 110% to create the title. According to Lead Designer Jacob Minkoff, “With The Last of Us, we are as efficient as we can possibly be. It’s just squeezing every last drop of power out of the system. And it’s a system we know really, really well. We know its constraints, so we can push it to the edges and play it really fast and loose because we know what the system can handle.”