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[Hermii]

Question, if cloud does help graphical input and stuff like that, would that possibly mean the Wii U successor will be more powerful than what we would think...Or?

We know nothing about Wii U successor, but if they follow the same design philosophy it will be a low powered but efficient device. Good performance per watt, but not a lot of watts. Eventual cloud tech is meaningless to speculate on.

 

[JimboJones]

That's a pretty gross misuse of the term. Distributed storage systems that cloud storage companies use are quite different in functionality and network architecture than traditional relational databases. A SQL server at a data center does not make a cloud.

It's still applicable as cloud is a pretty broad marketing jargon term.

 

[KojiKnight]

Question, if cloud does help graphical input and stuff like that, would that possibly mean the Wii U successor will be more powerful than what we would think...Or?

There are definitely tricks you could use the cloud for to increase graphical fidelity.


Take a city scape for example. We know the cloud is going to have latency, so you won't be able to use it to render anything you directly and quickly interact with, but you COULD use it to render far away objects. Things that won't move much even if you change angle/run towards it...

You could essentially render maybe 100 feet around your character on the system, and have everything beyond that rendered "in the cloud" (BS numbers, just an example). This would allow for (mostly) real time rendering of very complex scenes in the background while freeing up resources to work exclusively on what's close by.

 

[rpmurphy]

It's still applicable as cloud is a pretty broad marketing jargon term.

The catch-all meaning of the term by business is so incredibly useless, it's best to just ignore its use by anything other than from the technical viewpoint.

 

[KojiKnight]

Here's an image I quickly drew up as to what I meant in my last post.

The circle in the middle signifies the play/player's camera.

Everything in the blue circle is rendered locally (everything you can directly interact with and the immediate area surrounding you).

Everything in grey is being done completely in the cloud.

The orange lines signify the players PoV/FoV.

The brownish lines are the buffer, that is what the Wii U/X-box/PS is being sent from the cloud so that you have some lee-way to make up for latency in rendering.

Think of those 3D room renders you see on websites and hotels, the cloud would basically be doing the same for medium to far off objects, but only sending a slice marginally larger than what your FoV is to save on bandwidth.

The problem would be keeping those synced, but with modern latencies in the 50-100ms range, I'd say it's completely doable. The game could, as a protection against unexpected ping spikes, download a "key frame" of the entire 360 view (say once every 10 seconds) so if there is lag, you wouldn't be left with absolutely no background in part of your FOV. With your attention mostly on the foreground most people wouldn't even notice.



That would be just one way it COULD be done (not saying how it will be done). If the issues could be dealt with, it'd be a great way to free up system resources (mostly ram since you could then just worry about streaming nearby environments on the fly instead of preloading everything) and allow you to improve on the area immediately around the player character where the primary focus will be at.