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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.'"
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/
There are currently too many people playing your new game, and the servers can't handle it, so... yeah...
Isn't this just leading up the same chaos that is any Ubisoft game launch?
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.
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.
They might have 3 times the expected peak usage but NOT 3 times the power of every XboxS sold.
Sounds amazing! I can't wait for all the articles about hammered servers on release and server maintenance.
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.
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.
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
They promise the cloud
But their promises are vapour
So by "Power" they mean "Dependence on Mother Microsoft"
NOPE
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...
Cloud: Buzzword, meh.
+
Phone-home requirement: Disturbing.
+
Camera and mic that can't be disabled at all: Frightening.
=
I can't tell if this is 1984's telescreen or Max Headroom's rebus tape feed.
Either way I'm not letting one in my house.
I think it depends on the company doing it. World of Warcraft likely does server side processing. Simcity was just a botched attempt to do what mmo do.
The most CPU intensive tasks in videogames are usually Rendering, Physics and AI. They work either in realtime or precomputed to some degree.
There is rarely a situation where you want to offload computation to something that takes a while (network latency), save for maybe pathfinding or geometry regeneration but is this more like a special case and has limited uses.
Can anyone really think of a general case optimization where this can be useful for most games?
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.
This won't work for any calculations in game that are latency sensitive. Someone push a button and the game needs to react? Cloud magic won't help, you need to deal with it locally.
It won't work for anything that's data-intensive, because they can't expect to send significant data back and forth reliably while people are already trying to play multiplayer on a lousy connection.
Since those are the two main things where a console with this level of local power might need help... what the hell are they supposed to be using all these servers for? Sounds like another Simcity debacle in the making.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Why wouldn't they do that locally on one of the many CPUs that aren't required to show the game? Just what calculations are going to be so crazy intensive and yet have a dataset small enough where it's going to be faster to transmit it, calculate it there, send the results back, and load them?
There's almost no games that actually use four cores in a current PC, so what are they planning on doing that's going to require the equivalent of triple that while not generating (or requiring as input) a gigantic data set?
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
Sony and MS thinks everybody lives in a world where the connection is great, never drops and has awesome upload speeds. I live in Brazil and have fiber with 15mbps of Download and 1mbps of Upload. And I'm one of the few that have access to fiber. Most are still using ADSL, ISDN or Cable. Well, let's see what happens when two consoles with the same hardware launches in the same period.
Whats the point of getting a console anyways?? They are saying the consoles are so underpowered they need a boost from a network of servers?? I call Bullshit, What game is so power hungry it needs extra servers to run? None. This is a major waste of resources everything it takes to make electricity thats not necessary.
Jack of all trades,master of none
To maintain your household under constant marketing surveillance. I'm waiting for Bruce Schneier to weigh in on this one, specifically. He does an excellent examination of the general case in his recent "Surveillance and the Internet of Things"
Microsoft is taking Xbox further down the road of current trends in targeting and profiling "users". The model for most web applications and nearly all mobile apps has been that of of the Trojan Horse. An apparently benign, amusing or useful set of functions is presented the user, often below the cost of producing the technology. It does no good to labour the point with tedious argument: the applications are invasive and - depending on your perspective - abusive of privacy.
XBox One is the adaptation of these trends, delivered into the home as a 7/24 data collection head, with a colour camera and a microphone that can't be turned off.
"German federal commissioner for privacy protection: "Xbox One is a surveillance device"
Civil Liberties Australia says Xbox One 'meets definition of surveillance device'
Privacy breach: Xbox One a 'twisted nightmare'
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Because he has a ton of money and incredible broadband and loves to give middle fingers too!
While I can't possibly see it as being legitimately profitable to Microsoft to provide 3x processing power in Azure for every X1 sold, I will at least say that Microsoft at least owns the datacenters and the software stacks for Azure as opposed to EA or Ubisoft. It's possible that MS will be better able to handle the processing and bandwidth for this reason.
To be fair, Microsoft didn't says how long they'd provide 3x processing in the cloud for each console... For example, didn't Apple's Siri get dumb or dumber sometime after launch? Not trolling, just asking - siriously :-)
In other words: Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Can anybody explain to me what do they mean with "pre-compute" or not updating every frame? And how they would achieve that? Or rather, a case where they could use it?
The fog example is kind of okay, because you *don't* need to update the fog every frame (frame of what? Logic Frame? Render Frame? Network Frame?). But the pre-computing a scene makes no sense at all because by then you might aswell just pre-compute once and slap it on every media. Unless I'm missing something and that's not what they meant at all for pre-compute?
TL;DR: can anybody explain it to me as if I was 5 years old?
Sure. The bad man at Microsoft is lying to us. He wants to convince you that something magical will happen in a special "cloud" that will make your game better. Sadly, there is no such magic. Instead, the cloud is going to make it so that sometimes at random you won't be able to play your games. He doesn't want you to know this, which is why he's lying.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
This is why Microsoft has been so vague about saying anything involving the used game market, or console-level DRM. What they are basically doing is setting up a system where publishers can build DRM right into the game under the guise of "extra processing power" so that when the backlash starts, Microsoft can sit back and tell everyone to take it up with the publishers.
Further taking away from the idea that games will be able to use extra processing power for actual gameplay and stuff, is that game developers always aim for the lowest common denominator when setting performance benchmarks. They aren't going to design a game that can take much advantage of cloud computing because they know full not everyone has high quality broadband with no bandwidth cap. Sure, you might see the occasional turn based strategy games or flight sims using it for real-world data or weather or something, but by and large it will be ignored for any significant features.
Microsoft knows it's about DRM, but doesn't want to take the bad press for saying so. Publishers know it's about DRM, and are willing to take the bad press for utilizing it as such.
When every console you sell costs you money, this seems like an extremely natural evolution. This is an excellent way for Microsoft to hemorage less money on consoles while having extra horse power than can be used for actual money-making purposes. This reduces risk.
Selling hardward below cost is becoming unsustainable. It has led to diversity in the game market dropping off. This writing has been on the wall for a while.
Yeah, those 300,000 servers in data center are free.