Can't believe what I'm reading

There's nothing that the cloud can do to magically enhance games framerates.

Short answer: No.

Long Answer: If you want to render a game at 60fps, that means your console/computer needs to calculate and render the entire scene every 16 milliseconds. Given that just the pings to a cloud server would be longer than that, let alone also uploading instructions to the server, waiting for the server to calculate those instructions, and then package and return the results, then have the console unpack those results and plug it into the game... It's just not possible with today's technology.

The only thing "the cloud" can help with right now is things that aren't directly interactable by the player, such as lighting or large-scale physics. One good example is Portal 2, which uses a lot of "pre-rendered" physics.

The opening sequence to Portal 2 actually took over 90 days to calculate all the damage that occurs. Obviously, we don't want 90-day loading times. So all the physics were calculated beforehand, and the results of those calculations are put into the game's code. So your game machine isn't actually calculating the damage physics in real-time, it's just "playing back" what was already calculated.

Something kind of like that is the best we can expect out of "cloud power" right now. However, not quite on the same scale as the example above. Also, remember that the destruction is not interactable once it starts playing out.

I think it will be ever a legend.

The cloud wouldn't directly produce 60fps, but offloading enough non-time sensitive tasks to the cloud could free up enough console side resource to allow 60fps. As long as there was an offline fps and an online fps I don't see why MS shouldn't be onto it ASAP.

Is the XBL Gold paywall an added hurdle for cloud processing? Obviously to play Crackdown 3 MP you need XBL Gold. But if Cloud processing becomes a single player thing will it require Gold?

MS making excellent use of cloud processing means other platforms will follow suit. Cloud processing can make a creaking PC like mine into at least a moderately good gaming PC. My PC is always online and so is my PS4, so having a game that needs an internet connection on either platform isn't a big deal to me.

Then they'll only sit on the way side, while other games that do use it pass them by. If MS wants to give this level of destruction to Battlefield and EA as a marketing move, that's not going to make CoD look very good.

The physics don't have to transfer at the same framerate.

Crackdown 3 runs at 30fps, the physics update at 12fps.

And yet even if the XBOX 3 had 14x the CPU power of the XBOne, it would only offer the same level of physics as CD does.

Sunken costs. Redundant for crackdown anyways since its a MS published game. Even so MS already moved live over to the 300,000 servers a couple of years ago.

300k out of 14 million is nothing (especially since the latter number will grow over the rest of this generation) it's 2% of their server capacity.

The cost for game developers:

So, why did we build Xbox Live Compute? When we were planning the next generation of Xbox Live, we spent a lot of time talking with game creators about ways to make games better. We realized that there was an incredible opportunity to bring together the resources and global scale of Windows Azure, with the game services of Xbox Live to build a cloud computing platform that was uniquely focused on gaming and game creators. Our intent was to enable developers to take advantage of server resources in their games without having to deal with the challenges that come with building, managing and running servers at scale. So, we chose to provide cloud features that allow the game creators to push the limits of their gameplay experiences and apply the bulk of their investments to game creation, rather than server and operational resources. In fact, we even give them the cloud computing power for FREE so they can more easily transition to building games on Xbox One for the cloud.

There seems to be some confusion in some of the articles describing Crackdown 3. If you have a online game where multiple players interact in the same virtual world then clearly servers will be maintaining that virtual world and doing many calculations which multiple computers will retrieve as data for how the world is rendered on their console or computer. This will be the same for many online games be it pc, ps4 or xbone.

Then there is the view that somehow that servers can be used for part of the console's normal processing so graphics are improved and and frame rates increased.

I think Microsoft is trying to present cloud computing as something unique to them and somehow they are achieving more with it when in fact its just normal server processes which they are trying to sell as remote computing that assists the xbox one in a different and more advanced way than pc or ps4.  Lets just wait and see how Crackdown 3 turns out and what has been achieved with it. I strongly suspect the xbone will continue to have 900p graphics and inconsistent frame rates as always. Perhaps even less consistent frame rates if they have actually moved processes to servers which would normally be done by local computing considering the current performance of internet connections.

If they really wanted to improve xbone performance by using remote computing they should have worked out a way of utilising home pc's doing some of the processing for games. I'm sure there are many pc's and laptops close to the xbox one that could be utilised. I'd think it quite clever if my windows tablet and laptop suddenly started working with the xbox one to make 1080p 60fps games possible.

As far as I can tell, the cloud doesn't work in the way they originally advertised it. It can run servers, and that seems to be about it. So you know, dedicated servers. It's a cool idea, but cloud streaming to lighten work load only really works under perfect conditions. If one aspect of the game is a quarter to half a second off from the rest of it, it would be incredibly disorienting. I'm sure it will work eventually but not now. The other problem is they have to design for the weakest link. In this situation, it has to be for the person playing offline. Devs won't make a game that's unplayable unless it's being ran under perfect conditions.

That's exactly what CD has shown. How to take a game that would otherwise run at <1fps on local hardware and increasing it to 30fps and how 100% destruction was better then limited destruction.

They demoed this earlier in the year:

Well it is quite unique to them....Nintendo really isn't in the game for this kind of business and Sony can't even afford to keep the servers up for their yearly sports games, so they obviously couldn't do the same. The One has the most powerful CPU this gen...and this is at least 14x that power, how is PS4 Sony going to top it? Because if they can't, it really does mean its less advanced.

Doesn't matter what resolution this renders at...these physics are still impossible on any other platform. ...the closest hardware would be 2-3 high end PC CPUS linked to gether or next gen consoles in 6-7 years.

You have less hardware in your home capable of the additional processing power then at the other end of your phone line. It's just easier this way.

The most impressive about that (already often linked) demo with low-polygon blocks is the immense slowdown of the XBO without cloud computing when are a few thousand objects are laying around (but without further movement). It seems to me that they programmed it extra bad to let the cloud computing shine even more in comparison.

And it's often better to use the GPGPU for the physics stuff than the CPU:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JA1PJPrZiQ4

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DA_k2NA80vM

https://youtu.be/4vzNs4Uo8PU?t=33m45s

http://gfycat.com/PracticalLastGnu

Or one dual core pc with a single GTX 680 in 2013


Actually the 2013 demo is more impressive as the destruction is instant.
That 2014 demo uses slow moving rockets, giving the server time to prepare the results, hiding lag.