Sorry, but the cloud is a gimmick for gaming. It's pointless innovation that one day will stop working. And that day, computers will probably be powerful enough to outrun the Azure features anyway.

Try reading the article. It goes into cool details about what the servers handle and how multiple servers are spun up for each session to handle all the physics and different destruction possibilities. And at the same bandwidth it takes to stream an HD movie on Netflix :)

wait what the eyetoy like the kinect???? Yeah sure and a Nokia 3310 is a phone like an iPhone.... There is absolutely nothing technically alike between the two beside having a camera...

and PSnow might be like Netflix streaming... But gaming pass is also hugely different from a technical stand point since you actually DL the game which is far better and you get a discount to buy the game if you want it....

Trying to picture as an innovative   gaming company is just crazy... Nintendo is and MS too... Sega also... Sony just a ghoul sucking out the life of good competition for two decades with unimaginative mass market trends... Smh

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-Super_Boom

not happening in any of our lifetimes.... And I'm the guy saying new tech are around the corner when people say it's 20 years out... But just a server farm power is powerful enough to be unstainable on a single computer for decades to come...but if you know how azure works it just takes that already crazy number to entire new level.... Azure has virtually no compute power boundaries... It just ads up as many servers or even server clusters as you need... It scales to how much you need with virtually no limit and considering the size of MS server farm in the hundred of thousands you are not getting that on a single PC anytime soon and probably ever...

plus the future is cloud computing... With ever growing bandwidth and shrinking latency one day  there will be no point in having a powerful computer when all you'll really need is a good terminal and a big connection... What we will see is home servers or even building servers (it'll be standard in apartment complex one day) and a bunch of terminals that connect to it... Cheaper more efficient etc... But a PC chip that can replace azure let alone a single server farm... Not happening (I don't think you realize the compute power it represents) you could put a thousand i7 last gen CPU with max ddr4 ram and 4 titan SLI and still not match what a single MS farm compute power can output...

If Azure is so powerful, why Office 365 on Azure is so sluggish?

So I assume this is always online?

If M$ delivers and the Cloud enables me to freely blow shit up on a massive scale with impunity, it is no longer a gimmick in my mind.

lol You seem like a Microsoft fanboy (or girl?). Sorry to ruin your "innovation" moment but this was created by Cloudgine not Microsoft. Cloudgine could use different servers and make games for other companies if they wanted.

The servers are only handling nonlatency dependent physics computations for the CPU. Basically, the cloud is helping the CPU remember the position and location of each object in the world, similar to other online games that rely on dedicated servers to handle massive amounts of players.

Everything else has to be generated by the Xbox One. The graphics are created by the Xbox GPU which means sacrifices will still have to be made to the graphics to accommodate the destruction.

The 3x power with the cloud was a big fat marketing lie that Microsoft used to draw attention away from the Xbox One specs backlash. It doesn't provide 3x the power of the CPU, GPU and RAM of an Xbox One. It only provides a fraction of what a full Xbox One is capable of. What they should have said was, "3x the nonlatency dependent physics" which is not 3x the power of an Xbox One.  

Crackdown 3 doesn't look very impressive when comparing it to offline games from last gen like Red Faction Guerrilla.

Cloud computing has no business and never will have any business with personal computers. I have no interest in letting someone else do my computing for me, let alone internet connections are far off from getting the bandwith and latency for terminals to act as far away thin clients.

What I meant with my first comment is that the Azure platform will only accelerate certain parts of the game (like physics). Regular computers will eventually outpace this feature simply because Microsoft won't give you more horses at a certain point.

I still think its a bad solution to gameing, to have servers somewhere do the work load for the console.

What happends 8 years from now when you maybe wanna play the game again, and MS has taken down those servers?

I vastly prefer they keep all the demands of the system, on the system itself.