As many said, latency could be the biggest problem. A latency acceptable and often unnoticeable on cloud office apps, can be eccessive for games and other real time apps. OTOH cloud computing can excel for persistent worlds and MMOGs in general, where it can provide greater availability, reliability, scalability and fault tolerance, while a reasonably low number of small arrays of data per second can be used to describe the interaction between the player character and the world, but this, as noted, could be not viable in simulations, where the faster the vehicle simulated and the higher the detail of the simulation, the higher the refresh frequency of the physics engine and the shorter the latency must be. Obviously programmers can find other uses, but they'll have to find at least one point in their game engines where limited bandwidth and higher latency are acceptable and put there the separation between computations performed on the clients and in the cloud.

If i'm not mistaken doesnt Diablo 3 for PC also use some assets from their own servers and not local based. I forget exactly what and how it works though.

Real Racing 3 uses the cloud for savegames, and generally the net connection for "Time Shifted Multiplayer" and to add new cars. When the connection is down, you race with bots, obviously, but you also lose access to new cars added after the game's release, even if you already bought them.

AnthonyW86 said: BenVTrigger said: avais1993 said: Can someone please explain how cloud can make it more powerful? Developers can offload things like physics, AI, and load times to the cloud to massively free up the CPU and GPU. Theoretically it coukd make things like 4k gaming a reality Sorry to bust your bubble here but that would mean it would have to have a constant internet connection, and a fast one with that. Any hiccup and your retail bought game becomes unplayable. Just to clarify cloud based gaming can work, and system based game what we have now works, but not a combination of both. Latency alone would mean any optimisation on a game based on the Xbox One's specs becomes impossible.

Sorry but what you claim isnt possible to me seems like its already happening on the PC with MMOs. IN an MMO your PC does part of the work and the server does part but both come together to make the game world playable and all players present and accounted for. If what you were saying was true. We wouldnt have MMos today because our PC cant do part of the work while the server streams the other yet that is exactly what they do.

kowenicki said: Dr.Grass said: kowenicki said: Dr.Grass said: kowenicki said: MS does cloud better than anyone. I don't think people realise this. It's a core business for them. http://hothardware.com/News/Sony-Acquires-Gaikai-Worlds-Largest-Cloud-Gaming-Service/ lol oh dear Look at Microsoft azure, investigate microsoft cloud services for enterprise, Look at Office 365 and sharepoint then look at  Gaikai, an idea that never got anywhere and was never eevn functioning properly and sony paid way over the odds for. Then go back and consider the MS expertise in this area and then throw in the fact that MS are putting 300,000 new servers out there.   Do you REALLY think there will be a performance boost in your living room when you play a single player campaign due to physics and AI tasks being offloaded to one of those servers? What type of boost? Graphical? Frame rate? Is it mandatory? But sure, point taken. I was just throwing that at you cause I'm skeptical as a mother*&ker about this being ANYTHING other than PR that will convince the user that it's worth keeping his console online all the time. Calm down. now go back and show me where I said any of that. i merely said they are best placed to use the cloud.  Which they are.  Thanks.

Thanks for responding to my queries and skepticism. Much appreciated. Also, for pointing out that my emotional state is detrimental to proper communication.

i merely said they are best placed to use the cloud

I'm merely saying that it's going to be worth jack-shit and I have no reason to suspect otherwise. Nor do I believe you or anyone else could make a convincing argument to sway my opinion.

ListerOfSmeg said: AnthonyW86 said: BenVTrigger said: avais1993 said: Can someone please explain how cloud can make it more powerful? Developers can offload things like physics, AI, and load times to the cloud to massively free up the CPU and GPU. Theoretically it coukd make things like 4k gaming a reality Sorry to bust your bubble here but that would mean it would have to have a constant internet connection, and a fast one with that. Any hiccup and your retail bought game becomes unplayable. Just to clarify cloud based gaming can work, and system based game what we have now works, but not a combination of both. Latency alone would mean any optimisation on a game based on the Xbox One's specs becomes impossible. Sorry but what you claim isnt possible to me seems like its already happening on the PC with MMOs. IN an MMO your PC does part of the work and the server does part but both come together to make the game world playable and all players present and accounted for. If what you were saying was true. We wouldnt have MMos today because our PC cant do part of the work while the server streams the other yet that is exactly what they do.

The game engine still runs entirely on the PC though. There is alot of information streaming from servers but that's player information, enviromental changes etc. Your pc still does all the calculations. In other words the servers don't ''add any power''.

thranx said: If i'm not mistaken doesnt Diablo 3 for PC also use some assets from their own servers and not local based. I forget exactly what and how it works though.

Yes, it did, but it also caused a lot of stuttering issues and lag, especially early on with the heavy server loads. This is for a game that is fairly light on a graphical level.

What Microsoft are claiming here just isn't realistic for a long time.

Scoobes said: thranx said: If i'm not mistaken doesnt Diablo 3 for PC also use some assets from their own servers and not local based. I forget exactly what and how it works though. Yes, it did, but it also caused a lot of stuttering issues and lag, especially early on with the heavy server loads. This is for a game that is fairly light on a graphical level. What Microsoft are claiming here just isn't realistic for a long time.

Even after a year of release I still get stuttering, lag and rubber-banding BECAUSE Blizzard thought it was a great idea not to have a server near-by, so it was a 300ms jump to the US of A instead and a "deal with it" because it's not financially viable. (Yet ISP's here have offered high-speed servers with fantastic CDN's for free to Blizzard, yet they refuse to budge.)

Cloud gaming of any form has never been a smooth experience at all for me.

Pemalite said: Scoobes said: thranx said: If i'm not mistaken doesnt Diablo 3 for PC also use some assets from their own servers and not local based. I forget exactly what and how it works though. Yes, it did, but it also caused a lot of stuttering issues and lag, especially early on with the heavy server loads. This is for a game that is fairly light on a graphical level. What Microsoft are claiming here just isn't realistic for a long time. Even after a year of release I still get stuttering, lag and rubber-banding BECAUSE Blizzard thought it was a great idea not to have a server near-by, so it was a 300ms jump to the US of A instead and a "deal with it" because it's not financially viable. (Yet ISP's here have offered high-speed servers with fantastic CDN's for free to Blizzard, yet they refuse to budge.) Cloud gaming of any form has never been a smooth experience at all for me.

Exactly why I don't see many devs making efficient use of this. What MS claim in the OP is typical marketing crap. All companies do it but this is pushing it.

Scoobes said: Pemalite said: Scoobes said: thranx said: If i'm not mistaken doesnt Diablo 3 for PC also use some assets from their own servers and not local based. I forget exactly what and how it works though. Yes, it did, but it also caused a lot of stuttering issues and lag, especially early on with the heavy server loads. This is for a game that is fairly light on a graphical level. What Microsoft are claiming here just isn't realistic for a long time. Even after a year of release I still get stuttering, lag and rubber-banding BECAUSE Blizzard thought it was a great idea not to have a server near-by, so it was a 300ms jump to the US of A instead and a "deal with it" because it's not financially viable. (Yet ISP's here have offered high-speed servers with fantastic CDN's for free to Blizzard, yet they refuse to budge.) Cloud gaming of any form has never been a smooth experience at all for me. Exactly why I don't see many devs making efficient use of this. What MS claim in the OP is typical marketing crap. All companies do it but this is pushing it.

No it is not marketing crap. You are just generalizing the "cloud" computing...
For you and many it is like playing remotely to games (like Gaikai or OnLive) or to have a CDN which is TOTALY different from what Microsoft is proposing.

If it is so hard to understand, just compare what their VCPUs with small dedicated servers. Maybe you do not see any potential to that but I see a LOT of potential and idea to use this. I aready gave few exemple in this thread but haters will not even read them as they want to stick on their own "idea" of what Microsoft is proposing... More convenient I guess :)

The only thing Microsoft did wrongly (like many other companies and certainly not by pushing it like you said, I can show you some very good exemple (even recent) from another "big" console company which is way more ridiculous...) is too take as an exemple something about the rendering. While I think it may be used that way; it would be complex for a dev. team to use it in a an efficient way...

But using it to pre-compute the next room/area for instance in a game... Or to process all the background tasks in a persitent world like Skyrim etc...
And then free up the local CPU for other stuff is actually just easily doable...

I just do not get why people are bashing when a company is adding more stuff and possibilities (looking at all the sig, I think I understand why actually :))...
If you "don't" like it just ignore it but it is still a plus at the end for future Xbox owners.