This makes me sad and angry. Carmack of all people should be pushing for more performance, but I guess he outgrew that after iD lost most of the market.
You didn't actually read the article, did you. Christ:
Games developed for the next-generation of consoles will still target a performance of 30 frames per second, claims id Software co-founder John Carmack.
Taking to Twitter, the industry veteran said he could “pretty much guarantee” developers would target the standard, rather than aiming for anything as high as 60 fps.
ID Software games such as Rage and the Call of Duty series both hit up to 60 fps, but many titles in the current generation fall short such as the likes of Battlefield 3, which runs at 30 fps on consoles.
“Unfortunately, I can pretty much guarantee that a lot of next gen games will still target 30 fps,” said Carmack.
Higher FPS and higher performance aren't necessarily identical.
Give me a say year-2016 machine and I could target 300 FPS with what currently reaches 30 FPS, but no-one except some GPU geek would notice. Or I could use all that added performance, do many more interesting things at a much higher scale than today, at once -- physics, fluids, crowds and all other kinds of sims -- by still targeting "only" 30 FPS.