In case you didn't get enough technical inspiration from John Carmack's annual QuakeCon keynote and Q&A session, gamasutra have a new interview with the id Software programming legend, offering yet more insight into the development process of RAGE and id's Tech 5 engine.

Here's a few of the more interesting tid bits. On choosing running at 60FPS (on consoles) over prettier graphics at 30FPS:

But the key point is, people might argue pro and con relative to another game, we're running at two times the framerate of almost all the competition, and that's something that I'm really personally proud of, because that was a hard-fought battle internally. Because life is just easier when you've got 33 milliseconds instead of 16, but I think it matters. I think I could have made the game look better at 30 hertz. We could have had some more design freedom.

Why is that so important to you?

JC: It's that subtle feel of that... In fact, it's interesting; I did a number of experiments during this, where we say, "Okay. 60 is better than 30. Is 120 better than 60?" And I did some test cases on there, and interestingly, almost nobody can tell the difference between 120 and 60. A few people, like high-end professional gamers, can tell the difference.

When discussing why they no longer license their engine technology, he goes on to explain some of the limitations of id Tech 5 that tailored competitors can do better:

If you wanted to do the next Grand Theft Auto that had a city... It's too much surface area to MegaTexture everything at the level of detail that you want to do. If you want to do a game that's all about walking around with torches, our dynamic lighting approximations are not as good as you might want for something like that.

Closing out the interview are his thoughts on Nintendo development, with respect to the Wii and Wii-U:

Many, many years ago, we had negative experiences with Nintendo, but the only reason we're not doing anything with Nintendo now is just that the technologies are out of sync. It's a perfect opportunity to do PC, 360, PS3, but you couldn't have the same content base also targeting the Wii. But, you know, the new platform is probably just right there. It would probably be straightforward to target our stuff over there. It would depend on what the business case is for any of that.

RAGE is due on PC, Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 on October 6th 2011. For more details, check out AusGamers recent interviews with id Software's Tim Willits and Todd Hollenshead.