Microsoft: Cloud quadruples Xbox One power

[futurefields]

What do you guys think of this? Using cloud processing to render lighting fx and so forth...

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Xbox-One-Cloud-Jeff-Henshaw-Matt-Booty-Adam-Pollington,22775.html

Is that even possible? To render GPU effects on a cloud like that?

 

[purbeast0]

im so fucking tired of the buzzword "cloud". it's thrown around EVERYwhere now.

if you read the article, it isn't rendering gpu effects on the cloud. it is simply offloading the complicated calculations to the cloud, then the cloud sends the result back to the local console, and it renders the results. sounds feasable.

 

[futurefields]

im so fucking tired of the buzzword "cloud". it's thrown around EVERYwhere now.

...

how have you not been banned?

 

[purbeast0]

...

how have you not been banned?

what? for not liking the buzzword cloud?

 

[Aikouka]

People love to come out and toss around buzzwords, but one of the biggest problems is where do you find good places where latency-insensitive calculations exist in a game? One decent example might be certain things that occur on a loading screen. Let's say a game uses randomly-generated levels, but it knows that it will be using specific textures to actually "paint" the world. The game can go through the process of loading all of the art assets while it sends a request out to generate a level (or simply retrieve one that's already been generated).

I've seen some articles that suggest that this would be done in-game, and the user would actively notice a change in graphical fidelity as the scene changes in accordance with the cloud-generated data. I don't know if I'd like that, because it sounds way too much like texture pop-in, which is really annoying for anyone that has a heavy-PC leaning.

...

how have you not been banned?

They haven't received the result to their ban(purbeast0); call from the cloud just yet.

:biggrin:

 

[Anteaus]

Is this how similar to how cloud helps power Simcity? We all know how massively successful it was there.

 

[nickbits]

Is this how similar to how cloud helps power Simcity? We all know how massively successful it was there.

Came here to say the same thing

 

[zerocool84]

Yet more incentive for them to say it needs a constant Internet connection.

 

[Arkaign]

Yet more incentive for them to say it needs a constant Internet connection.

True, it also seems like a preemptive pile of BS to help defend them against the truth that the PS4 is simply a more powerful unit.

 

[Kneedragger]

Probably the worst idea I have seen for gaming. It will probably create too much latency and seems like a gimmick selling point. I found this article pretty interesting.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming

 

[colonelciller]

im so fucking tired of the buzzword "cloud". it's thrown around EVERYwhere now.

if you read the article, it isn't rendering gpu effects on the cloud. it is simply offloading the complicated calculations to the cloud, then the cloud sends the result back to the local console, and it renders the results. sounds feasable.

similar to the "complicated calculations" EA spoke of for Sim City?

let's call out the 'DRM in disguise' for what it is rather than pretend that complicated calculations are occuring on microsoft servers costing what... hundreds of millions of dollars to billions of dollars... assuming they actually intend to sell as many units as their PR depts have announced and assuming there won't be massive queues to "connect" to your own console before being allowed to play.

 

[Tweak155]

People love to come out and toss around buzzwords, but one of the biggest problems is where do you find good places where latency-insensitive calculations exist in a game? One decent example might be certain things that occur on a loading screen. Let's say a game uses randomly-generated levels, but it knows that it will be using specific textures to actually "paint" the world. The game can go through the process of loading all of the art assets while it sends a request out to generate a level (or simply retrieve one that's already been generated).

I've seen some articles that suggest that this would be done in-game, and the user would actively notice a change in graphical fidelity as the scene changes in accordance with the cloud-generated data. I don't know if I'd like that, because it sounds way too much like texture pop-in, which is really annoying for anyone that has a heavy-PC leaning.



They haven't received the result to their ban(purbeast0); call from the cloud just yet.

:biggrin:

This is pretty much my exact view on it. Also with 8 cores, how much faster can the "cloud" really be (I don't like cloud either)? Use the local resources to their fullest extent and I think just the time it takes to send and receive (Let's be real, if the result was simple, so is the calculation) will be slower than doing it locally. If it's calculating tons of data, it takes time to send that data.

 

[Tweak155]

Yet more incentive for them to say it needs a constant Internet connection.

Also this.

True, it also seems like a preemptive pile of BS to help defend them against the truth that the PS4 is simply a more powerful unit.

And this.

 

[lupi]

Wonder how much EA paid them touse their Sim City press material, cause I can't believe MS would be this stupid on their own.

 

[BrightCandle]

The only legitimate offloading I can see that might be worthwhile is when playing multiplayer to offload the server. By having dedicated servers you remove the bandwidth constraints, offload quite a lot of CPU and thus can use the cloud to get more players into a game. Its nothing new of course, most PC games come with dedicated server support, but its one feature I can see is worth offloading.

 

[Doppel]

I am not saying it will be this amazing change to gaming (remember how much it sucked for the kindle fire with its supposed fast web browser, for example), but some technical possibilities are there for something cool.

I didn't know a game had a huge amount of latency-insensitive stuff going on, though. I know there are loading screens, and in theory if a remote server loaded a game for you it could dump it into your memory, thus saving you all the processing time, but of course even on an incredibly fast internet connection that would be slow as hell.

in general, though, at least given what we know now it's absolute bullshit to say it's like a quadrupling of power, or at the very least highly disingenuous.

Also, given how slow most people's broadband is, I think in general this extra processing power will be used sparingly by developers who need to be sure they don't alienate most users from a good experience.

i think this will be in retrospect probably one of the larger moments of pre-console bullshit hype.

 

[smackababy]

Have you guys never actually played a game that used a server to calculate things? WoW does this for damage, loot, spawning of mobs. Offloading things from the client is helpful. Sure, you require an internet connection, but this is 2013.

Wanna play a game with large, randomly generated levels? Good luck doing that on your console. They can be generated on the server much faster then just rendered by the console. The client is pretty much a dummy client and the servers can take care of all the real work.

 

[Gunbuster]

I can see what they are dipping a toe into this tech. Instead of having all the compute on EVERY XBO you centralize some of it. The 60% of user watching Netflix or Hulu dont need it and never touch it. For gamers they have excess Azure cloud datacenters sitting around.

Just don't try to game right before tax day when companies spin up extra Azure compute nodes for tax software/web servers...

 

[Mushkins]

Lets ignore the marketing buzz for just a minute. Cloud computing and streaming technologies are already making the rounds. Sony has already partnered with Gaikai to integrate a certain degree of this very technology, doing all the calculations and rendering "in the cloud" and sending it to your console, though there's no indication as to the exact implementation yet (most likely PS1/2/3 emulation and streaming instead of hardware BC). Likewise, OnLive has made a (failing) business out of doing this as well: their servers do everything and stream it to your PC. Even the Nvidia Shield is using streaming technologies as a major selling point.

Is this going to revolutionize gaming and make the XBOne the "top dog"? Not at all, but it'd be stupid of Microsoft not to make an attempt to implement this tech in some way, even if it's up to the developer to use it or not. At the very least it's one more check box on all the comparison marketing materials, and it does have legitimate potential uses even if they're currently edge cases.

 

[clok1966]

Have you guys never actually played a game that used a server to calculate things? WoW does this for damage, loot, spawning of mobs. Offloading things from the client is helpful. Sure, you require an internet connection, but this is 2013.

Wanna play a game with large, randomly generated levels? Good luck doing that on your console. They can be generated on the server much faster then just rendered by the console. The client is pretty much a dummy client and the servers can take care of all the real work.

your saying the new batch of Consoles cant randomly generate a large world? you can generate an almost infinite sized world on a handheld phone (minecraft) while its not a super detailed world, textures and items are just numbers and would not take that much longer with the amount of processing power a Console has..

WOW only does this to curb cheating, not to speed things up. ANY game programmed well wont be spawning mobs in a location your not at, hence current gen and next gen consoles can do this just fine.

I do agree a server is going to be faster.. yes even much faster.. say and xbox takes 30 seconds to generate it, a server can do it in 3-4 seconds...

2013 yes... and MS markets to a US market (note they always say #1 in US as they are dead even worldwide) problem is US is not the wonderful High speed utopia most of us assume it is.. we are 16th behind many smaller less developed countries..Our high speed is priced almost the highest, many place quote 6-12% do not have internet.. often when including the almost 40% in america who considered living under the Poverty level its much higher.. And all of you who say 'don't have no money, shouldn't be buying toys".. fine thing to say.. but they do buy .. and account for quite a bit of console sales.. MS just shut them out.. be it whatever.. that wont help MS bottom line.

 

[smackababy]

your saying the new batch of Consoles cant randomly generate a large world? you can generate an almost infinite sized world on a handheld phone (minecraft) while its not a super detailed world, textures and items are just numbers and would not take that much longer with the amount of processing power a Console has..

I am not saying they can't do it, I am saying there is little point when it is easier to do it on a server (especially for multiplayer).

WOW only does this to curb cheating, not to speed things up. ANY game programmed well wont be spawning mobs in a location your not at, hence current gen and next gen consoles can do this just fine.

And what happens if you enter an area too fast? Well, you have to load now. A server can be generating this content, to no detriment of your gameplay and just load it up for the console to render.

2013 yes... and MS markets to a US market (note they always say #1 in US as they are dead even worldwide) problem is US is not the wonderful High speed utopia most of us assume it is.. we are 16th behind many smaller less developed countries..Our high speed is priced almost the highest, many place quote 6-12% do not have internet.. often when including the almost 40% in america who considered living under the Poverty level its much higher.. And all of you who say 'don't have no money, shouldn't be buying toys".. fine thing to say.. but they do buy .. and account for quite a bit of console sales.. MS just shut them out.. be it whatever.. that wont help MS bottom line.

I highly doubt people living in poverty don't have access to internet. Let's be realistic. Can they afford it? Barely. Should they buy it and a console? No, but we can't have MS cater to fiscally irresponsible people in its business model.

 

[Doppel]

Have you guys never actually played a game that used a server to calculate things? WoW does this for damage, loot, spawning of mobs. Offloading things from the client is helpful. Sure, you require an internet connection, but this is 2013.

Wanna play a game with large, randomly generated levels? Good luck doing that on your console. They can be generated on the server much faster then just rendered by the console. The client is pretty much a dummy client and the servers can take care of all the real work.

And nothing WOW does has ever made your PC feel any faster graphically. Most of what it its servers do is because they have to; a continual online world needs a central server. Without wow these examples are not relevant.

A random world is not a bad example if we allow liberally to assume that the bandwidth limitation doesn't make things ern worse but most games cannot benefit from a random world anyway.

For certain things a server can probably do them a thousand times faster than an Xbox. For graphics and real time physics the server is hardly if not entirely irrelevant.

It is a little like a guy selling a car capable of 200mph and pretending that it will let me get to my destinations in half the time I can in my current car with half the top speed.

 

[DaveSimmons]

This won't be used for cross-platform games, because Sony isn't going to bother to set up a server farm for this. MS can do it cheaply because those 300,000 servers are just part of their Azure platform they've set up for businesses. They'll sell all the idle server time for business use like Amazon does.

MS might pay EA to put in BS code to use the awesome server power to add puffy clouds or better trees or something (shades of hardware PhysX for extra sparks or dirt), but nothing that matters. Or like the games that crippled the DX 9 graphics to make the DX 10 graphics look better by comparison. ("These shadows required Vista and DX 10, no way we could do them in DX 9, nuh-uh!")

Randomized worlds have been done locally without servers since the DOS days, and probably since the Apple II.

Servers make sense for multiplayer, but for single-player I wonder whether it will ever make sense. If the server is generating hundreds of MB of data, it still needs to be transferred to the Xbox -- will that really be faster than generating it locally? If there isn't much data, then was it a big enough job to be worth sending off to the server?

 

[Arkaign]

This won't be used for cross-platform games, because Sony isn't going to bother to set up a server farm for this. MS can do it cheaply because those 300,000 servers are just part of their Azure platform they've set up for businesses. They'll sell all the idle server time for business use like Amazon does.

MS might pay EA to put in BS code to use the awesome server power to add puffy clouds or better trees or something (shades of hardware PhysX for extra sparks or dirt), but nothing that matters. Or like the games that crippled the DX 9 graphics to make the DX 10 graphics look better by comparison. ("These shadows required Vista and DX 10, no way we could do them in DX 9, nuh-uh!")

Randomized worlds have been done locally without servers since the DOS days, and probably since the Apple II.

Servers make sense for multiplayer, but for single-player I wonder whether it will ever make sense. If the server is generating hundreds of MB of data, it still needs to be transferred to the Xbox -- will that really be faster than generating it locally? If there isn't much data, then was it a big enough job to be worth sending off to the server?

See this is where I start to think that they're insane.

Perhaps in a local 10GBe network, where bandwidth and latency are extremely good, this is feasible.

But let's take your example of puffy clouds/etc. How would this 'sync' up and be helpful in any way to the local game engine and GPU output? What content can it stream? If it's just static texture data, maaaybe, but it'll still take time to transfer depending on size. If it's something more complex, well good luck with that. They already struggle to utilize the various CORES, not just on PCs where they can argue that they won't waste time optimizing when most play on Dual-Cores, but on Consoles that have multi-core resources to work with.

This is like taking the hyperthreading section of a processor, moving it off the die, moving it down the street, moving it across the country over the internet, and then saying that it'll somehow be useful.

Don't get me wrong, a powerful server network and good infrastructure (which I firmly believe they WILL have) will make the user experience a good one for those with good connections. I just severely doubt that it will introduce anything that couldn't be done better locally with the right work, and at worst, trying to 'cloud' graphics will screw things up terribly.

 

[Kev]

Just don't try to game right before tax day when companies spin up extra Azure compute nodes for tax software/web servers...

Also don't expect to ever be able to play a popular game within 2 weeks of its launch.