Cloud Processing won't mean a thing for the Xbone

[Machiavellian]

walsufnir said:

Shinobi-san said:

walsufnir said:

Shinobi-san said:

I don't think MS is talking total crap when they say they can drastically increase the power of the console using the cloud.

But as of right now, its more PR speak than practical IMO.

I think if the world had a significantly better internet infrastructure then Cloud computing would be beneficial to the level MS are currently claiming. But that infrastructure just isn't there. Certainly not in 3rd world countries....and I would argue even in most first world countries.

I see latency, bandwidth and generally unreliable internet connections as the biggest issues here. ESPECIALLY LATENCY.

Not to mention, companies have not proven they can use cloud computing for gaming consistently yet. Most companies just mess it up.

Also, people like to talk about MS's cloud computing capabilities and its Azure platform...but this is mostly used for Saas and IaaS type applications. None of which are really bandwidth intensive or latency dependent. These things become major issues with games.

Exactly, good post. I am looking forward to anything MS will show us what they really wanna do with the cloud but by now it is totally unclear what they are trying to do technically. I said in several posts that this is especially also a problem with Gaikai but I think most people don't understand what we are talking about because they are "only" gamers which is, to me, perfectly fine but as people who know what they are talking about we have reasonable doubts on the whole topic.

Furthermore Sony and MS will get hate if their solutions don't work but it is not them to blame but the customer's internet connection.

I don't think what MS is talking about is similar to Gaikai though?

Gaikai is plane old streaming. If you gave good bandwidth, a fast internet connection and decent latency you can do gaikai.

But when half your game needs the cloud to function....then thats a different case i think.

 

no but the technical concerns are mostly the same: you don't know of the connection the customers have. gaikai will also greatly depend on latency. but it is nothing sony can calculate with. ms and sony can only provide a "service", build up data-centers, make contracts with peering-partners but can in no way influence the experience for customers.

I am not to sure on this.  As mentioned the two technologies are totaly different.  If what I post is pretty much common knowledge please bear with me.

Gaikai host a game instance on a server, then streams the video to a client. For each person who wants to play a certain game, an instance of that game is created. Think of this like having multiple virtual machines. For example sake, lets say 5 virtual or even hardware machines each one running a version of windows and either sharing or have its own vid card. So when a users request a game, the virtual/hardware machine spins up an instance of that game. Software behinds the scenes take the outputted video, compresses it and streams it to a client. There is software on the client end that docompresses the video, and display the results while capturing input data and sends it back to the server. The software does not perform any computations of game code nor does it distribute it resources among multiple different servers.

Cloud Compute execute code or jobs like your CPU/GPU would natively on your console. Think of how the Cell processor works. Developers create multiple jobs which are just snippets of code that they send to the different cell processors to work in parallel. The Cell processor works on each code independent of the other processors and sends back it's results. From here the main processor takes the finished code and deliver the results depending on what was calculated like, AI, physics, lighting you name it. With cloud compute, MS is able to leverage thousands of servers each having a number or processors and each processor able to execute multiple threads.  The way that MS cloud platform works is that all of these resources are virtual.  They are not tied to any particular hardware for fault tolerance.  

From the way that MS new Orleans platform works, developers can host an instance of their code on the cloud.  This takes care of bandwidth and latency issues when sending from the client machine.  On the cloud server, the code is executed and can be replicated to multuple instances.  The code could then split out processes to be worked on like a Cell processor and then the results combined and sent back to the client machine.

People have stated that why would MS go down this route when you have games able to do the calculations upfront.  As I was doing a little digging on my break. I stumble on this intel project to do ray tracing using cloud compute.  The article presents some interesting ideals on the type of rendering techniques that could be performed on the cloud that you would not see within your current or even next gen console.  Here is the link

http://software.intel.com/en-us/articles/experimental-cloud-based-ray-tracing-using-intel-mic-architecture-for-highly-parallel