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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.'"

13 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 hairyfeet · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.
    2. 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."
    3. 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 WilyCoder · · Score: 5, Funny

      Shut up Ballmer.

    2. 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.

  6. Marketing by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    They promise the cloud
    But their promises are vapour

  7. they don’t necessarily have to be updated ev by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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...

  8. Cloud Really? by MellowBob · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.