Xbox One "secret sauce" revealed. 40x more powerful than 360 when connected to the cloud.

[Alby_da_Wolf]

Scoobes said:

nikosx said:

"Things that I would call latency-sensitive would be reactions to animations in a shooter, reactions to hits and shots in a racing game, reactions to collisions," Booty told Ars. "Those things you need to have happen immediately and on frame and in sync with your controller. There are some things in a video game world, though, that don't necessarily need to be updated every frame or don't change that much in reaction to what's going on."

"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."

Booty added that things like physics modeling, fluid dynamics, and cloth motion were all prime examples of effects that require a lot of up-front computation that could be handled in the cloud without adding any lag to the actual gameplay. And the server resources Microsoft is putting toward these calculations will be much greater than a local Xbox One could handle on its own. "A rule of thumb we like to use is that [for] every Xbox One available in your living room we’ll have three of those devices in the cloud available," he said.

Source: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2013/05/how-the-xbox-one-draws-more-processing-power-from-cloud-computing/

The one thing I don't get is how will MS make profit from this? Cloud ressources cost a lot of money.

Thanks for the info.

I still don't see how this will be feasible, even with stuff that's less latency dependent like lighting if the users' net connection is poor. If the connection lags then are we going to have issues similar to texture pop-in but for lighting/fog/fluid flow? Are these things going to suddenly appear in all their glory as we play?

As for the last part, perhaps MS will make it an optional extra for users with Gold subscription?

I think that MS, as usual, was deliberately vague, and that 3X XBone power available thanks to the cloud will be justifiable in some ways, that obviously cannot be the raw computing and graphics power. For example that offloaded computing and the statements quoted by nikosx could mean that the cloud will allow single player games to have larger worlds, like MMOGs, with their remote parts being active, managed in real time in their evolution and ready to be loaded as the player approaches them. I agree too that MS tech can't solve the lag problems and this will limit the viable applications of cloud, but strictly speaking they'll be able to say that in some contexts that 3X power can be considered true. Obviously, with enough local storage, a client machine, be it a PC or a console, can manage vast worlds of any size, but the parts of those worlds that can be kept active at any time are necessarily smaller and depend both on RAM available and CPU computing power, while GPU power limits, and will limit using cloud too, the part of world that will be visible at any time and with what detail, cloud can't change it as lag problems would be unacceptable. In some aspects the claim is obviously stretched, in others it can really extend the console's capabilities, although in ways not different from any other server based solution, except that the cloud can be implemented, and scaled up when needed, a lot more cheaply, and using a lerger number of small nodes spread around the world, lag will be lower than using few central servers. But lag will always limit the possible applications, this won't change even when internet connections get faster, their lag will still remain orders of magnitude higher than latency in communications between the internal components of any single client.