MS will need to put servers close to you... that a fact... and I agree MS have a lot more gun to speend than Sony.

6ms is the response time (latency) for the command input from the controller on Killzone 3... Killzone 2 was a little slow close to 10ms... and for now there some guys that says that 6ms is slow to shoters... and in fact it is... that a Killzone issue that the devs are working in every new interation.

The PS3 controller is bad in response time compared to 360 controller... Sony seens to resolve that issue with PS4 controller.

Make the comparison with videos... the streaming services have low quality videos to fit into the internet bandwidth limits.

LOL are you serious here? Between Microsoft and Sony if one can afford something it is Microsoft :)
This little DRM panic, mainly from Sony fans, is not going to have any impact on the long plan for Microsoft...

lol I missed that part.

PS4 WW launch vs. Xbone 27 countries.

That's exactly my point about these. And if a scene object can wait for a cloud renderer, it will be a static one that simply could be precomputed and stored on disk (like Mirror's edge and BF3 lightning using radiosity).

About ray tracing, it demands real time update, even per frame, sice any camera movement demands a full recalculations of ray tracing. Radiosity can be precomputed at baked on textures since it only changes if the object changes and is independent of the viewer. Ray tracing depends on the viewer position.

We know that Azure can be used to offline rendering, since you can take the time you want to deliver a frame. But when talking about realtime, it's much faster. And only the time needed to transmit data between the nodes of the cluster is much more than the time of a frame.

I believe people need to think of the cloud as a distributed network that can perform many different functions.  The word cloud get used a lot so people get confused in thinking about the different applications that have used the cloud and how they are used.  Yes, cloud compute is just another term for client server technology which we have been using for years.  The difference is in the application of that technology.

What we see today is MS push to leverage their client server infrastructure for games.  I stated earlier that MS cloud is different from a MMO but I will recind that.  Instead think of MS cloud as your own local MMO.  What I mean by that is that MS Cloud creates a local store of your game state and can also process resources for your game.  This resource is saved in the cloud and fetch by the actual physica game running on your console.  There are things happening while you play a game that can be done ahead of time depending on where you are at and what you are doing.  This stuff can be offloaded to the clould for processing and steamed to the client as they perform actions within a game. It probably will take a lot more planning by a developer when designing a game but the benefit could be that more processing can be leverage for local stuff.

I would not call it a Marketing ploy because MS actually has been investing in this platform for years.  Instead, I would say that MS doesn't have enough real world examples to show the benefits.  The concepts are old but the application is new.  Also having the infrastructure to do it was probably another hurdle which I believe they are at a point to overcome.  The last piece would be the software and this is where Orleans come into play.

Yeah, but you have not stated which countries the PS4 will release in and I cannot find anything on it as well.  Both say they are world wide, only one says exactly where.  Can you show me Sony launch terrorities.  For the PS3 it was Japan and US.

You can use static illumination but that's a regression in game development.

Not both.

MS said 27 countries... no WW release.... NA, some countries in LA, few countries in EU, Aus/NZ... no release for everything else.

PS4 is already confirmed to NA, LA, EU, Aus/NZ... only Japan and Asia are not confirmed yet.

this article has been posted but looks like you havent read it

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-in-theory-can-xbox-one-cloud-transform-gaming

The pixal aruze example is invalid, is not real time rendering. Good thing that this article exist becuase before i had to explain all that myself. Ill pase the more important part here:

"Latency is going to affect how immediate the computational requests of the cloud can be. When a game needs something processed, it sends a request to a server and waits for the reply. Even assuming instantaneous processing thanks to the power of the servers, the internet is incredibly slow in terms of real-time computing. A request from your console has to find its way through numerous routers and servers until it reaches its destination, and the results have the same labyrinthine journey back. To put this in perspective, when the logic circuits of a CPU want some data, they have to wait a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) to retrieve it from its cache. If not in cache, the CPU has to wait as much as a few hundred nanoseconds to fetch the data from main RAM - and this is considered bad news for processor efficiency. If the CPU were to ask the cloud to calculate something, the answer won't be available for potentially 100ms or more, depending on internet latency - some 100,000 nanoseconds!

As a game has only 33 milliseconds to render a frame at 30FPS, such long delays mean the cloud cannot be relied upon for real-time, immediate results per frame. If you crash your Forza car into a wall, you don't want to see your vehicle continuing through to the other side of the scenery for the next three or four frames (even longer on those inevitable internet hiccups) until the physics running on the cloud return with the information that you've crashed.

The latency issue is something Microsoft recognises, with Matt Booty saying, "Things that I would call latency-sensitive would be reactions to animations in a shooter, reactions to hits and shots in a racing game, reactions to collisions. Those things you need to have happen immediately and on frame and in sync with your controller. There are some things in a video game world, though, that don't necessarily need to be updated every frame or don't change that much in reaction to what's going on."

With latency an issue, the scope for cloud computation is limited to a subset of game tasks. "

"The quarterly Akamai state-of-the-internet report keeps us up to date on bandwidth available on the real-world internet. Average broadband speeds in the developed world struggle to reach over 8mbps as of Q3 last year - that's only one megabyte per second. This means that whatever cloud computing power is available, consoles will have available to them an average of 1MB/s a second of processed data. If we compare that to the sort of bandwidth consoles are used to, the DDR3 of Xbox One is rated at around 68,000MB/s, and even that wasn't enough for the console and had to be augmented with the ESRAM.

The PS4 memory system allocates around 20,000MB/s for the CPU of its total 176,000MB/s. The cloud can provide one twenty-thousandth of the data to the CPU that the PS4's system memory can. You may have an internet connection that's much better than 8mbps of course, but even superfast fibre-optic broadband at 50mbps equates to an anaemic 6MB/s. This represents a significant bottleneck to what can be processed on the cloud, and that's before upload speed is even considered. Upload speed is a small fraction of download speed, and this will greatly reduce how much information a job can send to the cloud to process. Taking the Forza crash example, if the console has to upload both the car collision mesh and scenery mesh to the cloud for it to calculate whether they have collided or not, that's going to take several seconds.

Of course, we wouldn't send data over the internet without compressing it first. It's through compression that OnLive manages to stream high-definition game video over those same slow internet connections. If OnLive can do it with games, why can't it be done with game data for cloud computing? The main issue here is that video can be compressed with lossy algorithms that throw away large amounts of data that the viewer is insensitive to, producing a video that looks largely like the uncompressed source while needing a fraction of the data. This isn't possible with game data like AI or physics states or models."

Being able to offload compute intensive jobs such as pathfinding and offscreen environment frees up resources for local processing, thus indirectly improving graphics.