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SvennoJ on 29 May 2013
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scottie said:
ViktorBKK said:

There is a lot of buzz lately about the how the cloud will change everything, not only in gaming but in general.

What many seem to ignore is that internet infrastructure does not improve at the same rate as silicon. The cost of GPU power for example, has massively improved in the last 5 years. The cost of bandwidth on the other hand, has improved only slightly, and in some areas of the world, not at all.

Ok, from the sounds of that post, you don't really know what cloud processing is. Internet speeds don't need to progress at the same rate as processing speeds, because the amount of processing required in video games increases orders of magnitude faster than the amount of data a streaming service needs to send.

 

The advantage of cloud processing is that you do the work remotely, and then just pass the results to the console. The size of the results needed to be sent will either be constant, or slightly increasing.

 

Take as an example, if we wanted a complete cloud system, much like Ouya, where all the processing is done elsewhere and what is sent back is just a video.

 

If we had done this in 1985 to replace the NES, we would have had to send 256*240 pixels, and must change 30 times per second. This means we need to send 1.8 M pixels per second. The NES uses 2 digit hexidecimal for colours, so the total amount of data sent is 1.8M * 8, as a hexidecimal digit is 4 bits. The NES would require 14.4 Mbit/s

I can't find details for the Famicom modem, but a 3rd party alternative worked at 2.4 kbit/second. Internet speeds would need to be 7000 times faster to display it this way.


Nowadays, for the X1, we can get at best 3840*2160 pixels at 60 fps, which is 500 M pixels/second. Each pixel requires 24 bits, requiring 1.2 GBit/s. This is actually attainable for the X1 in locations with Google fibre. We can also drop the framerate to 30/second and resolution down from 4k to 1080p to massively reduce the load. I am not suggesting that this will be how the X1 streaming works, just demonstrating that the internet is developing faster than the load required to stream.

 

We can think of partial streaming solutions that the amount of data sent has not even increased since computers were invented. Lets say we had a chess game. The graphics and the users turn are handled by the Xbone, and the A.I. is handled in the cloud. This allows for use of super computers, creating an A.I. good enough to beat grand masters. What is the actual data sent? The location of the piece to be moved, and the location is is to move to. All that needs to be sent is A7A6 to move a pawn forward. This is the same amount of data that would have been sent with a chess cloud streamign service in 1950, and it'll be the same in 2050.

Slight miscalculation there 4K video at 60fps 24 bit is 11.1 Gbit/s. But with h.265 it can be compressed down to 30 mbps for reasonable streaming quality. Besides the point anyway. 

Yes chess is a good example, maybe also to speed up an end game of civilization. And to keep track of NPCs and objects over a large world and some dynamic changes in that world. (No too dynamic though since streaming world data cannot be lossy compressed and easily costs a lot more then a simple video stream)

What can it do for real-time gaming? Off loading background AI is pretty much the only thing that leaves some resources to speed other things up a bit. Yet there still needs to be a fall back in place in case the connection is lost. And does it really add to the game if every car and every person in a GTA game is persistant and animated by the server?