News - Xbox One uses cloud to render “latency-insensitive” graphics

[Pob255]

Why? They're not talking about rendering whole frames, just performing compute/sub scene rendering. Sending back the results of some calculation up to 30 times a second isn't going to be a bandwidth hog.

Latency is going to be more vital than bandwitdh.

Your right on bandwidth vs latency, latency was the big issue that plagued Onlive @ 720p

But how the heck are they going to do it? what they are saying here is that bits of the screen will be done by hardware at high frame rate while other bits will be done at a lower frame rate by the "cloud"
How do you sinc the two up into any meaningful image.

I think the physx example is the best here, it that you'll get additional clutter that is non-active (ie it has no effect on gameplay just there to look pretty) in fact that's exactly what it sounds like, they can add physx to games via the cloud

[Agent]

I think the physx example is the best here, it that you'll get additional clutter that is non-active (ie it has no effect on gameplay just there to look pretty) in fact that's exactly what it sounds like, they can add physx to games via the cloud

You still need to sync that with the engine tick though. This means the engine ticks are going to get longer (bad bad bad), or you're going to need to keep it outside the main engine tick. At which point, how? Overlays? and how many ticks is that going to take to keep it correct in relation to the game? Probably just as many.
You might as well just pre-compute it at that stage.

I'm still calling marketing BS on this - it's going to be something stupid like playing Angry Birds or arcade games with zero download time. This is not going to be used in any big title in any useful way.

The cynical side of me says this is a response to MS realising their console is lower spec than the PS4.

[crossy]

You still need to sync that with the engine tick though. This means the engine ticks are going to get longer (bad bad bad), or you're going to need to keep it outside the main engine tick. At which point, how? Overlays? and how many ticks is that going to take to keep it correct in relation to the game? Probably just as many. You might as well just pre-compute it at that stage.

I'm still calling marketing BS on this - it's going to be something stupid like playing Angry Birds or arcade games with zero download time. This is not going to be used in any big title in any useful way.

The cynical side of me says this is a response to MS realising their console is lower spec than the PS4.

I''m going to agree that this stinks of "marketing", and IS the XBone a lower spec than the PS4 - I was under the impression that the two boxes were pretty evenly matched?

At the weekend I came across an article that talked about "render caching" - so the theory was that you could use "quiet" periods in a game to pre-compute a whole load of textures/backgrounds. These would then be stuffed into a cache area and when the app needed those then - obviously - it wouldn't have to spend any time rendering them.

I've got to wondering if the XBox idea is similar - perhaps with the ability to stuff it's renders into a cloud-resident cache, then if a group of players are going to end up needing the same resource then the copy in the cloud-cache would be transferred to their (local) one. The XBL cloud is pretty large - so I would have thought that it would be able to call on a LOT of compute and storage resource!

As you say though, this seems overly complex and presumably games would have to be specifically written (at a low level) to deal with it. And I really can't see that happening given that all the major titles are cross-platform.

[Agent]

At the weekend I came across an article that talked about "render caching" - so the theory was that you could use "quiet" periods in a game to pre-compute a whole load of textures/backgrounds. These would then be stuffed into a cache area and when the app needed those then - obviously - it wouldn't have to spend any time rendering them.

I've got to wondering if the XBox idea is similar - perhaps with the ability to stuff it's renders into a cloud-resident cache, then if a group of players are going to end up needing the same resource then the copy in the cloud-cache would be transferred to their (local) one. The XBL cloud is pretty large - so I would have thought that it would be able to call on a LOT of compute and storage resource!

As you say though, this seems overly complex and presumably games would have to be specifically written (at a low level) to deal with it. And I really can't see that happening given that all the major titles are cross-platform.

I'd like to read that article, because it sounds like what's been done in games since....well...forever. You basically build the world in 3D, add lights, sounds and such. You make as much of this as static as possible (lights mostly) and then run the dynamic things as needed.

Loading materials / textures in as they are needed is called streaming and has been around for generations. You can even stream entire games easily in modern engines. Gears of war 3 for example - if you don't die, you'll never see a loading screen.


You can't pre-compute every outcome in a game world and cache it, it's just impossible. The resource use would be astronomical. The player never acts as you'd expect, hence why you need to render in realtime. Pushing this to the cloud would be even worse - latency, bandwidth, connection stability....why? What advantage?

Almost all dynamic content in a game is tick sensitive. Put it in the cloud and you've already lost.

If Microsoft truly have something here, it's going to be revolutionary and put entire companies out of business. Of course, this isn't the case given it was only a passing mention in panic. It's marketing with no information. I really like my 360 but MS have seriously dropped the ball on this.

[kalniel]

Simple use case is updating light maps. Rather than using fully dynamic shadows and lights for environments, you update light rendering once every while. Light maps can be baked into textures for eg half life 2 and fixed, or updated at regular intervals (think NWN updated every 2 minutes, Skyrim updates every 30 seconds or so). At some point, the time taken to compute these in the cloud might be less than the time taken to transmit the data. And in most cases they are input/lantency independent - the most critical shadows/lights you could still do dynamically. Those without internet would just get lesser resolution light maps/fewer updates.

[Agent]

Even that has very limited use though and would only work with some very specific scenarios:

*The lightmap would need to be something that updates slower than realtime
*It needs to be latency insensitive
*It needs to be of a resolution / complexity that means it can't be done in real time
*The light-mapped object would need a suitable environment that changes slowly to accommodate the above
*The lightmap would need to be in a situation where joining with other lightmaps isn't an issue
*Finally, it would need to be an environment that couldn't be pre-computed.

There is probably more, and that's already a decent list of prerequisites. The situation for this would be something non-standard and very unusual.

[kalniel]

Even that has very limited use though and would only work with some very specific scenarios:

*The lightmap would need to be something that updates slower than realtime
*It needs to be latency insensitive
*It needs to be of a resolution / complexity that means it can't be done in real time
*The light-mapped object would need a suitable environment that changes slowly to accommodate the above
*The lightmap would need to be in a situation where joining with other lightmaps isn't an issue
*Finally, it would need to be an environment that couldn't be pre-computed.

There is probably more, and that's already a decent list of prerequisites. The situation for this would be something non-standard and very unusual.

I'd argue it's actually the standard situation for most games' lightmaps. We're only talking environment here, so hillsides, non-destructable buildings/trees etc. Almost all games use static or infrequently updating lightmaps for environment, even those with day/night cycles. As I mentioned, you have separate lighting for dynamic objects. Go look at Skyrim for a great example - previous games in the series had much few environment shadows because it was very expensive, but even in Skyrim you can watch the environment shadows 'tick' across the landscapes every 30 seconds or so (you can change the period in the ini file).

The latency target for cloud stuff is supposedly 100ms or so - even within an order of magnitude that's already 30-300 times better than a current PC game in Skyrim's case, and frees up CPU for other stuff (like the more real time character shadows). On the other hand you could fall back to a local CPU computed lightmap and infrequent update when no access to the cloud.

[Noggsy]

I'm thinking sony might just win this round of the console wars purely on price and lets face it some of the games look phenomenal but that's just my opinion i'm a pc gamer and always will be so this isn't just a fanboy mouthing off.