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Hynad on 24 May 2013
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SvennoJ said:
Darth Tigris said:
So the PS4 will be able to stream full PS3 games from the cloud, but the Xbox One won't be able to offload SOME of the work for a next gen game from the cloud??? Really???

I can't believe this is only the beginning of how people are going to be about these consoles ...

Different thing. It's far more complicated to integrate lighting maps or cloth dynamics coming from the cloud (at slightly variable timing) into the existing rendering pipeline then to decode a (slightly buffered) 720p30 compressed video stream.

Plus nobody claims streaming full PS3 games will be better then playing them on a PS3. I have zero doubt that GT5 or Wipeout HD will be a disaster streamed from the cloud as opposed to running on a PS3.

This is PR bullshit, promoting always online (and thus gold) for single player games. Programming parallel streams for physics and graphics rendering is complicated enough without having to integrate data that may or may not be there in time. Plus the time to receive, decode, and the memory required to store that data, and simultaneously have a backup method ready and available is only taking resources away that could be utilized better locally.

It can do a lot for persistant world multiplayer games, mmo's with dynamic worlds. Send all the data around you from the server while doing the rendering locally, second life style. (You can do that for singleplayer too ofcourse, unique huge dynamic worlds. Except it's not economically viable to have a whole world running for each player)

Btw the cynic in me says it will mostly be used for targeted in game adds.


Digital Foundry nicely put it:

"But perhaps the most curious thing about the Xbox One reveal was the manner in which Microsoft's engineers - and Turn 10's Dan Greenawalt - referred to both "transistors in the box", and "transistors in the cloud", the inference being that Xbox One could evolve by offloading mathematical computations from the local hardware to the ginormous servers Microsoft is prepping for the new system's launch. There was talk of new worlds being generated in the cloud, and less latency-specific systems like physics and AI being processed outside of the console. It's true that this is an exciting prospect in terms of creating massively multiplayer open worlds where "next-gen" dedicated servers will be required to keep track of everything that's going on and feed that out to the gamers.

However, even the 20-30ms latency we tend to see on the raw exchange of data over the internet is an absolute lifetime in terms of rendering games locally, plus of course there's the fact that any game embracing this won't work unless your internet connection is always on. We're certainly curious about how this particular facet of Xbox One gaming will evolve in the long term, but we weren't particularly convinced by the ideas set out by the panel - many which came across somewhat as wishful thinking thrown out there with no real exploration or real-life applications."

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-spec-analysis-xbox-one