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

[HEXUS]

Will Microsoft’s 300,000 server cloud give the Xbox One a graphics advantage over the PS4?

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[kalniel]

Hmm, lucid looked at some similar technology to this in some ways, but it seems complicated. If you can accept lower latency then why not just increase the time available to render and update that part of the scene at a lower frame rate, while still on the local computer?

[crossy]

I'm really, really, really unsure about this. First off it strikes me as unnecessarily complex. Secondly if you've decided to operate your XBO in "offline" mode as much as possible (probably because you've got a tight-fisted ISP) then you obviously aren't going to benefit from this. Then there's the small matter of latency, where I would have thought that any hiccups in delivery are going to be very noticeable.

Being overly critical it would seem to me that this is a feature announced merely because they can ... ooo come lookee at our cool cloud compute thing

Unless this is MS admitting that the just-launched XBO can't cut it against the PS4?

[Pleiades]

Yeeeeah, bit sceptical. OTOH I was impressed that Onlive existed (and worked) at all; pre-launch it just sounded implausible to me...

MS might have something or it might not but at least they're thinking 'outside the Box'.

{Sorry!}

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I wonder what the minimal level of internet connection required is??

[Matsy]

I wonder what the minimal level of internet connection required is??

Probably more than most people have access too.
In anycase, this is going to be a MASSIVE badwidth hog and if you use this, you can't do anything else on your internet as it will be suck it dry.

[kalniel]

Probably more than most people have access too.
In anycase, this is going to be a MASSIVE badwidth hog and if you use this, you can't do anything else on your internet as it will be suck it dry.

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.

[Lee H]

All those on the cheap ISP's which can suffer from packet loss galore best get another ISP installed then if they think they're getting one of the new xbox ones.

[shaithis]

I just cannot see how this is going to work very reliably....

I think it's more a case of Microsoft trying to get early momentum as they have already stated that "the console will get more powerful over time thanks to cloud computing"

I fear that this will instead manifest itself as an OnLive-style service 2-3 years down the road....

[Agent]

Sounds like marketing nonsense. Given that there is zero technical details about it, I suspect that even more.

[NitrousX]

This is similar to what onlive uses on their servers, I know its using visualization using their windows azure tech. But like others have said some of us have capped broadband or we have intermittent downtime. If the Xbox1 needs to constantly connected to the net i'll think i'll pass up on it and switch to PS4. I have supported both consoles and i have both consoles but i think next gen i'll stick with one console.

[Scribe]

From a competitive point-of-view, it's nothing, the thing about cloud services is anyone can sign-up, even after the fact. We know Sony has Gaikai for game streaming and backwards compatibility, that's a huge investment of cloud servers and the knowledge to fully utilise them.

As a concept in general... meh... is kind of all I can say. I don't really want a service that relies on high-bandwidth internet and offers little in return. It could perhaps be used to add more detail to spectator gameplay after the fact, as you can have broadcast delay. Otherwise its uses remain as try-before-buy, play-as-you-download and CAD/rendering.

[Demigod]

They would have to have very defined set of events when this could help. General rendering it would be useless for as latency would be stupid even with a very fast line when it then has to work with the local computer to join the dots as it were. Crowd calculations large physics bodies stuff like that it should work for but latency would have to be factored in, the lag would be there you cant get away from it and this could lead to dropped effects. I would have to see how they plan to work this because as it stands the little description we have makes little to no sense. Services like Sonys Gaikai where everything is just streamed look bad enough and are laggy so no this doesn't work for me.

It would also like to know where these servers are 300,000 sounds a lot but it really depends what they are, what else they do and where they are. Are they spread world wide? Are they just the US ones? Are they just all the xbox live servers lumped into a number. Without more detail saying we have x number of server is meaningless pr.

Even in the best case this will be more work for the devs to make it useful, and they will have to factor in it just not working for x number of people based on simple connection, isp, and country. Microsoft will have to offer a solid framework for the devs to implement, which they are good at it must be said. But even with that Xone games will not present the same game to everyone. How many million Xones do they want to sell? I hope they have enough servers (simcity diablo etc)

[finnrogers]

This reminds me of Ageia's PhysX cards from years ago. Having one just added extra detail to in game scenes which weren't completely necessary (which is what the guy in the article seems to be describing). So people with poor/no internet connections would see little/none of these additional details in game.

I don't really see this being a revolutionary approach. It will require game devs to invest alot of time testing various scenarios for marginal gains, marginal because they must be optional to account for people with no connection at all.

Given that quite a few of the big titles nowadays are released multi-platform, how many devs are going to spend very long on refining the graphics output for just one of the systems? MS would have to have in place a solid devkit to exploit this... It will be interesting the see the results anyway.

[minicale]

What about people with a pretty bad internet because of where they live not exactly fair is it? I think this idea is just stupid it seems that now a days companies have the impression that everyone has super fast internet and make stuff rely on high internet speeds it ruins it for people who have bad internet and can't do anything about it.

[ZaO]

christ this sounds complex! but man it could turn out really good. i bet it'll be a mess for the first couple years at least, until all the devs get their heads round this system. then again, it could just be a cheeky marketing ploy to get people to think this thing will be awesome. i started off completely not caring. but now my interest in these new consoles is gradually rising. still, i'll give them a year and a bit at least before i consider a purchase i think. gotta see if they last more than a few months past their warranty.. 360 and ps3 gave me no faith!