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Digital Foundry's evidence-based analysis on Xbox Cloud potential
- Thread starter Man
- Start date
Good point. AI in reference to NPCs that do not affect your decision vs. NPCs/enemies that greatly affect your decisions. I meant the latter. In a persistent world, I can see the "cloud" being used but since it doesn't affect your decisions, I don't see it being effective (immediately).
PS2 launched way before xbox, here about the same launch
PS2 had the DVD hype locked in, no new format this time
PS1 vs N64 is debatable which one was the best. PS1 had CD.
Crowds can react a few frames behind without people even noticing it's not like it's the players on the court reacting a second later it's the crowd reacting after something happens just like in real life.
Right, because before this the general consensus was that it was completely possible? Some people claimed that the cloud (I.e. Windows Azure) doesn't even exist.
I think it's completely legitimate to deflate PR claims, but the reaction has ranged from scepticism to untenably vociferous criticism of the entire concept. I don't think anybody except a handful of MS weirdos believed the hype in this case.
Yeah, it's good to get this out there so people can understand how ridiculous Microsoft's cloud computing claims were and they'll definitely never be able to deliver on them.
Serious question:
Can a system like onLive be allied with local rendering? Forget the compute shit, I'm talking about what services like onLive and Gaikai currently do. Imagine if 70% of rendering is done locally and say it forms the foreground and the rest 30% is rendered in teh cloud and streamed back. In essence developers would have decide what has to be rendered locally and what part will be done offsite.
Can that be done, synchronization and image compression issues notwithstanding?
Can a system like onLive be allied with local rendering? Forget the compute shit, I'm talking about what services like onLive and Gaikai currently do. Imagine if 70% of rendering is done locally and say it forms the foreground and the rest 30% is rendered in teh cloud and streamed back. In essence developers would have decide what has to be rendered locally and what part will be done offsite.
Can that be done, synchronization and image compression issues notwithstanding?
I read the entire article. I'm still not convinced that having that stuff calculated by the cloud will have any meaningful impact in a videogame. Will developers want to spend time and money writing sophisticated cloud based simulations for a $60 game that can only run on one platform?
How would the cloud hold up to the release of a big title like a GTA? Hypothetically 300k people authenticating their game on day one plus the added burden of processing AI simulations to each of those clients.
Its not about timing, its about data. Yes You can precompute AI behavior in background, but how much bandwidth it would take? We are talking about hundreds of npcs.
Rendering in cloud and streaming texture/meshes of them is out of question totally.
The crowd can not be rendered a few seconds behind!
Do you even know what rendering is???????
If the crowd was rendered on the cloud then it has made the image data for the crowd that then the local console has to download and then composite on the rest of the frame data!
You would have the crowd rendered out of place when the camera moves!
I am getting really sick of having to point out simple things like this!
Shake Appeal
Member
No, but we can be glad someone in the gaming press is calling bullshit.
I can link to you the articles that simply took the claim at face value, as they are endless. But I suspect you don't really care about that.
It's not necessarily about everyone believing the claim 100%, but in huge amounts of the game journalist community reporting this information with not a hint of cynicism. In other words, misleading masses of consumers into thinking a feature might actually have the sort of potential Microsoft is bullshitting about, even if the writer of the article was skeptical.
It's a very important job to inform consumers in as detailed and concise a manner exactly why and how these claims are fraudulent.
How sad that this may be true. At least "blast processing" was referring to an actual hardware advantage. This is pure deception, plain and simple.
Imagine riding into Armadillo in RDR to find out that the town has been attacked by bandits who are trying to make off with the Sheriff in tow, so you join the shootout to rescue him. Only instead of being a mission or a randomly generated pre-programmed occurrence it's a result of the AI work being done on the cloud server while you were off in Thieves Landing.
I don't think that's an unrealistic possibility.
Sure. Gaikai will just render the background and send it as a video, and the game can stream in that video locally. But you run into problems where your background always lag behind the foreground, and there will be obvious disconnect between the back and foreground due to the compression of the video.
dragonbane
Member
Not really, they simply point out the truth.
No the cloud can't render parts of an image (it could, but too many problems to be realistic). Either render the whole deal and video stream it like Gaikai, or do some calculations, which the local client uses to render the image on the console hardware. Applications for this is AI etc.
KimonoNoNo
Member
I reckon/guess that the Sim City debacle was the real wake up call not some reaction to some leaked docs.
EA really shit the bed for their partner in crime.
And because the lies are so obvious, anyway, we shouldn't talk as much about them?
It is easy to rubbish said claim yourself by simply asking "Do I really believe they will have 10 times the number of servers available on launch day? What would they use them for when the usage isn't going to suddenly jump tenfold?"
May be true, but the general idea is that Microsoft did react do the extremely negative fan response. So maybe there is still some time for further tinkering... hopefully
Onlive is sending you video of final framebuffer.
Onlive technology can't be mixed with local rendering or you will have something like FF8 or FF7 3d models on video (like FF8 battle of gardens)
dragonbane
Member
No, it actually was the Orth debacle what caused this. They fired him. The shitstorm was gigantic, they obviously noticed this and our insider confirmed it.
Man was it ever a shit move to fire Adam Orth after this whole situation played out. Microsoft is just a complete dick company all around
Yea, that'll be the most feasible implementation. Some parts of the scene is simply a streaming video.
Frames not seconds & maybe this is the reason why the Xbox One has 3 display planes
Seconds or Frames it does not matter, it will be as clear as day that it lags behind!
And no, the display planes are nothing special, Compositing is nothing new what so ever for a GPU (Windows Aero, OSX and most modern X window managers say hi!) and is not the problem, network latency is.
R_thanatos
Member
Damn you forgot the water cooling part.
antiquegamer
Member
Well he disclosed information that he wasn't suppose to, regardless if it's true or not it was a dumb move on Orth part. You work for big company, sign NDA, you should be mindful of what you post on social network. If you are not sure then don't post.
It would have blown over but all the rage on NeoGAf pretty much ensure his demised, since the mass were calling for his head what was MS suppose to do? Shrug, I would do the same if my employee went on line and talk about company project that he has no business discussing.
As far as cloud computing services, it really is pretty much MS and Amazon. A Bloomberg article stating Forrester estimates of companies that use cloud computing, 71% use EC2 services and 20% use Azure, and heading to 35% by end of next year, which is crazy growth since they have been around for only 3 years and Amazon has been around since like 2006. Leaving 9% to the others, probably mostly consisting of Google. Granted, this is an estimate, but Forrester is usually pretty good I would think.
But, on topic, the cloud is certainly being used by MS for dumb marketing purposes. This should have been a segment of nice to have things for developers to utilize at E3 and expounded upon at Build. It certainly shouldn't have the tag line of "infinite power of the cloud". And it certainly shouldn't be being used as a way to claim to increase the less than the competition computing power of the actual box itself.
Did he really? Maybe I am missing a vital fact in that situation, but his tweets just seemed like him defending the concept of always-online, not actually confirming it was there one way or the other. Like, if I was in a position like Adam Orth, would I never be able to discuss the subject because incidentally the console I am representing has the feature? Or is it too much of a giveaway?
BruiserBear
Banned
Leave it to the Digital Foundry to drop the truth bombs.
Microsoft comes off a little desperate here, if only because anyone who knows a god damn thing about gaming hardware knew these claims smelled funny the moment they heard them talk about "graphical computations in the cloud".
IMO all this cloud talk is literally going to amount to one thing. Dedicated servers for multiplayer. That's a great thing, and Microsoft would have been smart to trumpet that from the start here, but instead they tried to push the claims way too far when they got into suggesting it was going to mean graphical improvements.
Microsoft comes off a little desperate here, if only because anyone who knows a god damn thing about gaming hardware knew these claims smelled funny the moment they heard them talk about "graphical computations in the cloud".
IMO all this cloud talk is literally going to amount to one thing. Dedicated servers for multiplayer. That's a great thing, and Microsoft would have been smart to trumpet that from the start here, but instead they tried to push the claims way too far when they got into suggesting it was going to mean graphical improvements.
Thats a possibility sure, but how is that better serving the game? Perhaps I ride into town and nothing is happening? What do I care what the AI has been doing prior to encountering them? and once I do encounter them, their routines need to be running locally because they need to react to me.
I believe the major uproar from gamers was evidence of that we all took it for good fish (and rightfully so it turned out).
He was the overall Creative Director of Microsoft Studios, a pretty damn high position (and I'm still a bit surprised they fired a person of that position!).
Frames not seconds & maybe this is the reason why the Xbox One has 3 display planes
Even a few frames can be disruptive if we're talking about large impact interactions (e.g. The player diving into the crowd, an explosion among them, etc. )
It just doesn't seem feasible.
Rendering some background asset and streaming it, say a really gorgeous animated skybox, then incorporating it with real time assets in the foreground isn't impossible, but synchronizing them would at best mean delaying the rendering of the local assets to match the background ones, meaning the game will be as leggy as if everything were rendered in the cloud. Doesn't make much sense.
Another reason this is BS is that, unless everyone is FORCED to pay for Xbox Live Gold in order to play single player games, there's no way Microsoft will allocate resources to non-paying customers.
Indeed. The remotely rendered elements would seem to be dangling along. As if they were attached with a rubber band.
Even with a delay of just one frame, this would be hard to ignore.
PJV3
Member
Then you ride into town and nothing is happening. I'm not sure what kind of argument this is supposed be, sorry. Sometimes in emergent gameplay, emergent things don't happen, so you shouldn't have emergent games at all?
LabouredSubterfuge
Member
This all sounds like an incredibly expensive and difficult way of doing not very exciting things.
hey like Sim City! sweet.
kingkaiser
Member
haha
quick, someone has to shop Ballmer's face on Goku's Body and make Bulma a tattoo with "consumer" written on it
It sounds like they'll have a lot of servers available for good xbl reliability and download speeds for the people who will become more and more likely to download games. It doesn't sound like it will do a damn thing for actual graphics or gameplay.
It's all just hand waving to distract people from their power deficit.
that is what I believe to be a possible gain from this.
Though this function can be done on separate servers as well, it does not need MS servers and can be implemented to work on any platform that has internet access, though Azure might make it easier for developers. Persistent world and NPC AI, inlcuding physics and behaviour in other cells could be improved by this.
BruiserBear
Banned
Multiple replies like this on the very first page.
Did you even read the article or the quotes before replying? The "cloud computing" claims are basically complete bullshit. So none of the theoretical possibilities are even worth considering.
We should definately have emergent games, but I think it would be wasted effort for a single player game.
I can see the benefit of a persistent world stored in the cloud that many players could influence and affect.
Honestly, I'm keeping my expectations low and quietly hoping to be blown away.
the_korben
Member
Ok, so thanks to this great article and some good posts most people now accept that the cloud won't be able to help you render your stuff. Instead, people are now talking about advanced AI simulations, environmental calculations, world-state events etc.
One question: why would we need a cloud for that? How many games nowadays are really held back by the CPU? Isn't rendering right now pretty much the only bottleneck? Couldn't a good multi-core CPU today perform a lot of additional calculations already and isn't it simply the case that no one cares to implement any advanced AI concepts? Or big crowd simulations...aren't those really limited by rendering rather than AI as well?
I would really be interested to hear what people who know their shit (e.g., Durante) have to say about this. Do we have any statistics on average CPU vs. GPU usage in modern games?
One question: why would we need a cloud for that? How many games nowadays are really held back by the CPU? Isn't rendering right now pretty much the only bottleneck? Couldn't a good multi-core CPU today perform a lot of additional calculations already and isn't it simply the case that no one cares to implement any advanced AI concepts? Or big crowd simulations...aren't those really limited by rendering rather than AI as well?
I would really be interested to hear what people who know their shit (e.g., Durante) have to say about this. Do we have any statistics on average CPU vs. GPU usage in modern games?
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