That's the thing... I've never once claimed I doubt the applications of cloud processing. That's what you went on about, trying to say I was saying there was no application possible or something along those lines. But that was never an issue. Not once. You're playing the apologetics card by bringing the other company's PR talk in the discussion. While the focus of this thread is about MS's claims. Not Sony's. Not Nintendo's...

Saying that cloud processing will make your console 4 times more powerful is a really huge claim. Especially when you say it during you reveal event. So yeah, basically, you agree that I have no reason not to be skeptical of this. So I guess the conversation is over. There's nothing to discuss with you. 

You want people to acknowledge that cloud processing has potential, and when they do, you call them off because they don't believe MS's exact claims?  What are you here for? Argue for the sake of arguing?

I never said I wanted people to believe Microsoft's claims at 100%... But it is alright as this is going nowwhere;

We both agree that companies' PR are over exagerating...
And we both agree that cloud processing has potential then.

And maybe we even agree on the fact that this thread title is wrong... As cloud processing will maybe not mean what MS is saying to the Xbox One; but certainly not nothing at all?

I don't think cloud processing will have such a big impact. And certainly not on most games. How much do you think MS will charge third developer if they wish to use it?  Nah. Most will settle for what they're already used to use. And maybe a fragment of the first party titles will make extensive use of it. Showcasing the potential. But I certainly don't expect it to be anywhere near the touted 4 times the power boost.

There is a lot of buzz lately about the how the cloud will change everything, not only in gaming but in general.

What many seem to ignore is that internet infrastructure does not improve at the same rate as silicon. The cost of GPU power for example, has massively improved in the last 5 years. The cost of bandwidth on the other hand, has improved only slightly, and in some areas of the world, not at all.

Ok, from the sounds of that post, you don't really know what cloud processing is. Internet speeds don't need to progress at the same rate as processing speeds, because the amount of processing required in video games increases orders of magnitude faster than the amount of data a streaming service needs to send.

The advantage of cloud processing is that you do the work remotely, and then just pass the results to the console. The size of the results needed to be sent will either be constant, or slightly increasing.

Take as an example, if we wanted a complete cloud system, much like Ouya, where all the processing is done elsewhere and what is sent back is just a video.

If we had done this in 1985 to replace the NES, we would have had to send 256*240 pixels, and must change 30 times per second. This means we need to send 1.8 M pixels per second. The NES uses 2 digit hexidecimal for colours, so the total amount of data sent is 1.8M * 8, as a hexidecimal digit is 4 bits. The NES would require 14.4 Mbit/s

I can't find details for the Famicom modem, but a 3rd party alternative worked at 2.4 kbit/second. Internet speeds would need to be 7000 times faster to display it this way.

Nowadays, for the X1, we can get at best 3840*2160 pixels at 60 fps, which is 500 M pixels/second. Each pixel requires 24 bits, requiring 1.2 GBit/s. This is actually attainable for the X1 in locations with Google fibre. We can also drop the framerate to 30/second and resolution down from 4k to 1080p to massively reduce the load. I am not suggesting that this will be how the X1 streaming works, just demonstrating that the internet is developing faster than the load required to stream.

We can think of partial streaming solutions that the amount of data sent has not even increased since computers were invented. Lets say we had a chess game. The graphics and the users turn are handled by the Xbone, and the A.I. is handled in the cloud. This allows for use of super computers, creating an A.I. good enough to beat grand masters. What is the actual data sent? The location of the piece to be moved, and the location is is to move to. All that needs to be sent is A7A6 to move a pawn forward. This is the same amount of data that would have been sent with a chess cloud streamign service in 1950, and it'll be the same in 2050.

They also said that background AI is not all that useful, as in not all that noticeable to the user. Radiant AI experiments with Oblivion didn't amount to much. The AI might do all sorts of clever things on the other side of the world, but what's the point if you'll never know about it.

I guess the best use of it is a dynamic growing world. Although not too dynamic since sending altering geometery over will quickly exhaust the bandwidth. Initially I was thinking it would be cool for a From dust style skyrim world, or Motorstorm with actual persistant terrain deformation mud physics, or Forza 5 with rain pooling and fluid physics. All too much data, especially with next gen's mesh sizes.

Can you animate large crowds on the server, dead rising, dynasty warriors style. Just to animate 2000 npc's at 30 fps you already need 7.3 mbps if you can compress the data down to a mere 16 bytes per npc.

So what can you do. Update the lighting of a race track (static environment) for a specific time of day. Is that really such hard work, GT5 can do it real time. Downloading the updated track, pre-calculated shadows and all, probably takes longer then preparing it locally. All next gen engines are going for dynamic global illumination. Moving objects affecting the lighting, smoke, swirling fog, trees swaying, clouds casting shadows, dynamic fire, dynamic lights, we're finally leaving pre-baked light maps behind.

What's left. Procedural level generation. Track editors where the server can render a highly detailed custom track. It might take a while to download the result but the server can have access to vast amounts of constantly updated data to create unique content. Certainly cool but not boosting the local rendering power.

Anyway I'm very curious what/if they show anything using cloud processing at E3.

Ok, from the sounds of that post, you don't really know what cloud processing is. Internet speeds don't need to progress at the same rate as processing speeds, because the amount of processing required in video games increases orders of magnitude faster than the amount of data a streaming service needs to send.

Take as an example, if we wanted a complete cloud system, much like Ouya, where all the processing is done elsewhere and what is sent back is just a video.