Demonstrating the growing convergence between portable devices and games consoles, id Software's CEO John Carmack demonstrated his id Tech 5 game engine running on an iPhone 4 at QuakeCon 2010.

The specific demonstration saw environmental content from the developer's forthcoming Rage title running at 60 frames per second, with Carmack controlling the action using a dynamic fly-through camera.

He described it as being a tech demo and stated that it wasn't the console version of Rage, or even a prototype game.

"Other people will go through all the real hard work of turning this technology into a full fledged game," he explained.

MegaWow

Nevertheless, what was particularly impressive was the manner in which id Tech 5 works over hardware ranging from Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 and PC to iPhone 4, iPad and older iPhones.

It's thanks to standards such as OpenGL ES 2.0, which enables fundamental graphics techniques such as programmable shaders to work cross-platform.

Indeed, features such as Carmack's dynamic streaming MegaTexture system - or "MegaTextured goodness" as he calls it - as well as lighting radiosity and surface stamps (or maps) - were clear to see.

Backwards compatible

Carmack said the power available on iPhone 4 and iPad meant he could "kill anything done on the Xbox or PlayStation 2" in terms of graphics, and parity with current gen consoles wasn't fair off.

"I did crank this up to work on the big screen," he admitted of the demo, although claiming the technology "ran great on the original iPhone 2G".

"The frame rate will be similar to Doom Classic, and significantly better than Doom Resurrection," he explained, of performance on older devices.

Industry wide trend

Yet however impressive the results, the move to get id Tech 5 working on iPhone isn't that surprising in-and-of-itself. A similar attempt is happening at engine company Epic.

At GDC 2010, its Unreal Engine 3 was demoed running on the Palm Pre, while Epic engineer Josh Adams gave a talk explaining how he was porting the technology to iPhone. The main obstacle to be overcome was the lack of memory and CPU processing capacity on the iPhone compared to consoles.

Danish technology company Unity has been the quickest into action though.

It ported its Unity engine to iPhone in early 2008, and the company now says it has been used to create over 1,000 commercial projects, demonstrating the potential for engine companies who can get their smarts working on the new mobile platforms.