Xbox One cloud is 'one area console has advantage over PS4', says Avalanche tech lead

[SvennoJ]

thranx said:

VGKing said:

The PR speak is beyond annoying at this point. If you want to know how exactly cloud computing will be used in the XBox and if it is even feasible, I suggest you read this Eurogamer article on the subject. Do you research and form your own opinions.

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming

 

here is an other article. Just for info

http://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2013/05/24/microsoft-will-back-xbox-one-300000-servers/

 

"Booty says cloud assets will be used on “latency-insensitive computation” within games. “There are some things in a video game world that don’t necessarily need to be updated every frame or don’t change that much in reaction to what’s going on,” said Booty. “One example of that might be lighting,” he continued. “Let’s say you’re looking at a forest scene and you need to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you’re going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that’s hugging the terrain. Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame. Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud—the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you’ve got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud.” This has implications for how games for the new platform are designed"

 

Yes great for this gen's games. But all the new render engines are moving away from pre-baked lighting, dynamic global illumination is the next big thing. Trees blowing in the wind, clouds casting shadows, moving objects affecting the lighting in the scene, destructable objects, fire, hundreds of dynamic lights at night, sounds more like a new gen to me then server made pre-baked light maps. Same for fog, static fog is last gen. Swirling fog, dust/sand, explosions with volumetric smoke casting shadows and interacting with the lighting. Cloud servers can't help with that, too much data.

I guess if you have slow drifting fog you can get away with 5 fps updates, same with slow moving clouds. I remember a pc game where you could set it up to run certain things at lower frame rates for higher quality visuals, especially for much nicer lighting. It was very noticeable though that the lighting was lagging behind. But it did look nicer... trade off. Not quite helpful for a 60fps target though.