Nealson did in a Boogie 2988 vid iirc

87.5% of people so far believe that the cloud is garbage. I think so too :P

We will see.

It's not going to underperform, it's going to do nothing.

The cell processor didnt underdeliver, it was simply super hard ot work with, the ones who mastered it liek Naughty Dog did stuf that loooks like Uncharted 3 and Last of Us with that processor, and seriously no next gem game has beat the Last of Us graphicswise yet.

The cloud wont underdeliver either, itll work exactly like its suposed to, meaning that it wont help increase the performance of games or theyre graphics in one bit, itll be awesome for multiplayer tough and other internet based services like backing up files and such.

You didnt even do the power of the cell line properly.


The cell proved itself time and time again. May i add that the 360 had the better graphics card but still could not keep up with the PS3 when it came to graphics. I wonder why.

Must be t3h sect3tz source.

Onto the cloud. Not to "rain" on M$ parade but a "storm" is a brewing and I dont want to be around when they get the backlash from it.

We don't know if the Xbox 360 had the better graphics card. In terms of flops? Sure, but there is so much more to performance than that.
Lets take the Radeon x1900 XTX... It had double the pixel pipelines as the Geforce 7900 GTX, it also had a higher "gflop" number, but in a large majority of games, the difference was pretty neglible, sometimes even wen't in the Geforce's favor.
The Xbox GPU however did have a few extra techniques that the PS3 couldn't do like hardware-based Tessellation and 3dc compression.

Now the other thing to keep in mind was the the Xbox GPU was more or less a "stepping stone" between the x1900 series and the incredibly horrible 2900 series, if it's architecture leaned closer to the 2900 series it's real world performance could have been impacted rather largely.

But let's be realistic.
Despite the claimed Cells "Super computing levels of performance" and how powerfull people hampered on about... It really didn't show in games, you didn't get 10x better graphics or framerates or resolutions or units/objects on screen.
It certainly wasn't the difference between the PC and PS3 that's for sure, that's why the Cell didn't prove itself. (I even had debates with people on this forum who claimed it was faster than my 3930K @ 4.8ghz. - Like that was ever possible.)

The Cell was mostly only used for framebuffer effects, it's simply not powerfull enough to do anything more complex, not to mention people seem to confuse "art" with "graphics fidelity" which are very different. (You can have a low-graphics game but make it look amazing with great art pre-baked into assets, Nintendo seem to be the masters in this regard.)

Exactly.  Sony, Nintendo, EA, etc. can and do use these type of cloud services like Azure for game backend services.

Now MS has likely spent time to integrate some Xbox specific features, and SDK libraries on XB1 to make it easier to use, so it isn't nothing.  It's going to add something to the XB1 experience.

However when you think about how many servers there are and how many users there are, there isn't server time to do graphics.  This is the broken idea, that the cloud will somehow accelerate Xbox One graphics and make up for it's weaker GPU.  As far as I know Azure servers don't even have GPUs (at least not most of them) so you probably could't run graphics better than Quake 1, and that would be a horrible waste of resources.

I believe you forget that MS already stated that every X1 game gets a dedicated server for free in which the developer can use as they please, Second is the cloud base platform Orleans that MS has developed.  Orleans allows pieces of code to run server side called grains.  These grains can be replicated so that multiple servers can operated on that piece of code.  Also those grains can be operated anywhere in the world an computed locally to a datacenter where the gamer is located.  This is how MS plans to tackle the cloud compute and its a platform they have been building for over 3 years.  Also, you really only have to have one server run an instance of the game and send pieces of code to other servers to process those results and send to the console.  Think of the main dedicated server as a traffic controller where it direct multiple cars to different paths.

So using Orleans, pieces of code that run server side can be crunching parts of a game constantly.  If done correctly, the server side code can already have the piece of code completed since a lot of stuff will not really change if processing environmental effects and just streams that info to the gamer console when they reach a certain area.  The info can be streamed in advance so its ready once the user gets to that section.  

Gamers have to stop thinking about the cloud rendering a scene instead of just performing calculations.  Even rendering a scene can be done by using similar techiques like Gaikai/Playstation now.

This stuff is how distributed cloud services work today and really not that new.  The thing is, its new for game applications which is why such services will take time as developers work out different solutions for how their game work.

If anyone believes, essentially, that the internet is going to make your games better, they are fooling themselves. If computer processing and rendering graphics could just simply be offloaded to the internet (meaning onboard hardware has less of a hassle running the game), then my shitty desktop I have lying around from 2001 should be able to run Crysis