lucidium said:
I've got ample experience with the latest SDKs for the current consoles and how currently-in-development, as well as already released titles utilize cloud, thats my point, outside of gaming the usefulness of cloud based computation increases dramatically because load based scheduling that would locally take a long time anyway loses nothing if that load is pushed elsewhere to be computed remotely and the results of which passed back. Cloud computation on rendering, or cloud like swarming for deformation, fluid dynamics, thermodynamics and so on are just as viable, but gaming, the viability of cloud based compute drops considerably, the best we will get in this generation is sub processed light math, that being lighting computed externally and the result streamed back as low quality monocromatic video which is essentially used as a the dynamic lightmap, but even then the local processing saved in doing this is minimal and would not be able to react fast enough to user input to be permissible on high dynamic objects, if youre muxing in the stream for a specific area cast from a building in a set piece with realtime lighting then depending on the speed and predictability of motion in the objects you want to calculate, then the viability for such processing is there, and could cause minimal issue should connection drop in quality or all togehter. beyond that though, we lack the connectivity to the average home and the hardware in these clustered servers to handle the demand of hundreds of thousands of clients connecting to process entirely different chunks of resource for various applications and games, hence why lab environments are all we've seen such computational demonstrations thus far. Sure microsoft would love to use it as a springboard for azure adoption but its not like they'll get much from additional XBL subscribers, Azure is doing fine as it is, without the gaming side of things chipping in, the gaming side has little impact other than being a bullet point for presentations and something to whet the lips of those attending such conferences who want to see how flexible the technologies can be. I maintain that we are years, perhaps a decade or more away from cloud computation making a descernable difference in games that could not be achieved with simple server side communication on existing infrastructures, or by simply having additional hardware resources locally (such as additional power on ps4). |
As to MS cloud compute, we really are around the corner. Just like Sony with PS Now, it will be limited to just physics and AI. Developers will do light offloading of task which will allow them to use those local resources for other things lke rendering. I believe MS will pace out their tech but we should be able to see something that uses it within this year as MS need to lead in this direction to get developer support.
Ahhh you are only looking at it on the gaming side. MS is looking at the X1 as a consumer device just like your smartphone. This is their plan not saying if they can execute it correctly but MS is looking for the X1 to be an integral device in a home and each person is using it for different purposes based on their services.