| FiliusDei said: Some people seem desperate to make other believe it is impossible for azure to handle physics in its servers. I wonder how many people have developed games in that gaf thread using azure for physics.... It's just ridiculous how anti xbox some people are. |
Azure servers are fantastic servers. They utilize Xeon processors and have great disk/ram setup as well.
HOWEVER :
CPU is the worst-case handler of physics. Remember in the build demo how they talked on and on about how much power it takes to run such advanced physics? That's not an exaggeration, it's HUGELY intensive. And remember, Microsoft bragged about having 300,000 servers. Each of those servers runs a single-package Xeon CPU that is optimistically akin to what kind of power is needed for ONE concurrent game session.
So take that for what it is, and best-case, you're talking one server for every player. Great, so a game comes out and sells 1.8M first week with cloud physics support. 500,000 people are trying to play first weekend. Another game comes out when game 1 still has 300,000 people playing it on peak hours and sells 2.2M first week, and 600,000 additional people are hitting the servers. Another game comes out next quarter, rinse/repeat.
Pretty soon you're talking MILLIONs of servers that would be necessary to perform CPU physics for these players. And the power has to be available and instantly responsive to player input/changing client-side variables. Easy? No, not even in the same universe as easy.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWUf-H1Qjd8
CPU is horrible at physics. CPU is for general purpose computing, GPU is infinitely superior for this kind of thing (same deal with distributed computing, look up Bitcoin mining/folding/etc).
If this was a real thing, all it would take is one indie or a small Microsoft demo that XB1 owners could run to show it working in the real world.
I'm not against progress, I'd love to see it work. I have over 20 years in IT in areas that overlap EXACTLY what they're talking about, and it's just not realistic.
