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Xbox One: Cloud Will Quadruple the Power, Says Microsoft

Posted by samzenpus on from the silver-lining dept.

New submitter geirlk writes "Toms Hardware reports that 'Group program manager of Xbox Incubation & Prototyping Jeff Henshaw recently told OXM that for every console Microsoft builds, it will provision the CPU and storage equivalent of three Xbox One consoles in the cloud. This allows developers to assume that there's roughly three times the resources immediately available to their game. Thus, developers can build bigger, persistent levels that are more inclusive for players.'"

8 of 400 comments (clear)

  1. Does this actually work? by Billly+Gates · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I know Nvidia has been experimenting with the idea and it has been mentioned here before many times.

    I would not be surprised if MS teams up with them but from my impression it is not ready for prime time. Latency is bad and home ISPs suck. -eg my fiber FIOS is not capped at 200k a second! Need to pay $155 a month to unlock it back to where it was last year?!

    With ISPs given a free ride to get rid of Net Neutrality they are deprioritize anything unless they double dip the consumers and site owners each way here in the US. Large textures with little latency being pipped back pre-rendered seems out of reach.

    --
    http://saveie6.com/
    1. Re:Does this actually work? by phantomfive · · Score: 5, Insightful

      It doesn't necessarily need to be a high bandwidth operation. Look at this quote: "Those things often involve some complicated up-front calculations when you enter that world, but they don’t necessarily have to be updated every frame." I presume that's from the article.

      The question is, if Microsoft is building three times the CPU in their datacenters every time they build a PC, why not just throw that power into the box itself? Then you can have the same processing power always there, and no latency.

      The answeris they aren't building out that much power in their datacenters. Which means when there's a big launch, people are going to have trouble playing it.

      --
      "First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
    2. Re:Does this actually work? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The PC is a great option, but PC developers want to protect their investments (which can be huge)

      Buyers/players want to protect their investments too. Thats something that is quite often (bluntly) ignored.

      Apart from being robbed of the possibility to re-sell their games (either because they finished it or it turned out to not to match their expectations) they have to put their trust in (sometimes multiple) companies to keep the authentication-servers on-line.

      Now they also have to trust those game-companies to actually put all that computing-power(?) and storage in "the cloud" for extended ammounts of time ?

      Personally I have walked away from quite a few games because I could "buy" the game, only than to have to beg for the keys to get the game to actually run.

      If you would tell someone that story (buying something but having to beg for the keys) but would exchange "games" with (the obligatory) "cars" pretty-much everyone would regard you as several kinds of fools. Funny when you think of it ...

      Bottom line: I'm not going to pay big money for games which have an unknown life-time and can suddenly stop to work -- or refuse to re-install in a couple of years (or much less if you got them, even though first hand, from a bargain-bin).

  2. Well, at least it's now confirmed. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    It is an always connected device, unless they have come up with a way for the cloud thing to work without an internet connection.

    Of course this also means that if you lose your internet connection, then you have 1/4 the processing power to run your game.

    1. Re:Well, at least it's now confirmed. by Tridus · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Maybe if MIcrosoft wasn't doing such a shitty job of explaining the positive, the reaction wouldn't be so negative.

      But they're not. They're saying "hey look, it's got cloud magic!" to an audience that has already dealt with the hype and subsequent failure of cloud magic for games.

      It's their job to sell it to us, and they're failing miserably. The response is entirely predictable.

      --
      -- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
  3. I call bullshit by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    They might have 3 times the expected peak usage but NOT 3 times the power of every XboxS sold.

  4. Sounds great by king+neckbeard · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I can't wait until MS decides that the servers running my favorite game aren't profitable anymore, so I am incapable of playing it anymore.

    --
    This is my signature. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
  5. Invasive by ischorr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I read that as "more invasive for players". Which is probably true.

    Cool, it'd be extremely difficult to use computing power offsite to do real-time calculations in parallel with local calculations. But it sure would be handy for crushing the used game market if we could lie say that we needed handle things server-side so you have to be online to play the game.

    Also it would be cool to mine everything you do since it'd be easy to market. People will agree to all sorts of seemingly minor invasions of privacy for trivial gains, like free stuff, or especially if it was required to play the game. ...What am I saying. That would never happen.