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Xbox One: Cloud Will Quadruple the Power, Says Microsoft
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.'"
So we can assume that Xbox One games will be always-online and have server side processing ala Simcity 5... because that worked out so well for EA.
the part i found interesting was:
"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."
so i suppose technically, instead of your xbox pre-calculating a lot of this stuff, its offloaded. it could be done intelligently too - so increase the quality and if your offline and your xbox needs to do the calculations - then they're done at a lower priority with less precision?
the fact that its calculations which dont need updated each frame means latency shouldnt be as much of an issue. we aint streaming live game feeds here...
EA claimed that Simcity needed extra processing power to run. A guy hacked his game and it worked fine offline.
WTF would a company use a expensive server for 3x the processing power of a middle level PC just for a $60-80 game?
- Former Simcity fan and soon to be former Halo fanboy.
Is MSFT gonna buy out all the ISPs? If not then who cares, the combination of shitty service and bandwidth caps will make this a non starter for a good 70%+ of the population if the states I've been to are any indication.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband, but the very same people that are left already have better devices to do the same thing such as gaming PCs, smart TVs, its the same stupid as hell strategy they did when pricing the Surface and that worked out real well didn't it?
Looking at these next gens I can see two positives, 1.- It'll make guys like me that sell and build affordable gaming PCs a LOT of money and 2.- With any luck the crackers will break this thing and then when MSFT can't give the damned things away because nobody wants their DRM-paloza we can pick 'em up and crack them and make halfway decent HTPCs out of the things like we did the original Xbox One.
But as far as an upside for the consumer? Sorry, not seeing one. Hell anybody with a PC less than 5 years old can pick up an HD4850 for like $40 and be able to play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC and by Xmas I expect to see the HD7750 if not the HD7770 for less than $65 and those on average are 40% faster than the 4850 while using half the power.
Lets face it PC gaming has never been cheaper, heck AMD quads have been going for just $50 online, and thanks to there being competition on both the hardware and the software the price is going down all the time. Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura, box games from Amazon, with so much competition you can have more games than you can ever play for practically nothing AND you get online MP for free AND there are literally thousands of FTP games to choose from...lets face it, all MSFT is doing is making going to the PC a better choice. YOU control the hardware, YOU control the software, YOU choose whom to buy what from, its just a better experience now that MSFT has taken all the positives away from the console.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
As Jim Sterling points out MSFT is pretty much giving the finger to everybody that doesn't have 1.-A ton of money and 2.- Incredible broadband,
I have a ton of money and incredible broadband, and I still think that Microsoft is giving me the finger with the Xbox One.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
It won't fix his problem ; it's usually an overloaded local router. I got to the point where mine was giving out 150ms pings just for one hop - it didn't have enough CPU and RAM to deal with the all the connections being thrown around by torrent-seeding media sharers.
Broadband is all set up for consumption - downloading your content like a good little consumer. It's not set up for everyone being a server of dozens of connections.