Xbox One: Cloud Will Quadruple the Power, Says Microsoft 400
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.'"
Does this actually work? (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.
Sorry kid (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Well, at least it's now confirmed. (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.
I call bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
They might have 3 times the expected peak usage but NOT 3 times the power of every XboxS sold.
Sounds great (Score:5, Insightful)
Invasive (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.
In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Or if you are in a commonwealth country like New Zealand, Canada, or Australia and have ISPs with 2 gig limits each month?
I image lots of hi res images being downloaded over and over again can fill that cap fairly quickly
Terminals: Wave of the Future (Score:3, Insightful)
So by "Power" they mean "Dependence on Mother Microsoft"
NOPE
Quadruple the pictures of people jerking off (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Simcity all over again (Score:1, Insightful)
Correct me if I'm wrong but most games are not even remotely inhibited by CPU usage. Mostly it is a issue of GPU which their cloud would not address. They seem to be trying to sell something designed from the ground up to combat piracy and used games. I haven't read one feature yet that is superior or doesn't make me think why the hell would I want that.
I think the main reason for the always on Xbox is so they can shove ads up our eyeballs, free2play everything with in game marketplaces, and just basically ruin video games. Enjoy the future kids and remember this as the end of an era.
Re:World of Warcraft (Score:2, Insightful)
Simcity is not an MMO. They tried to say it was, but it isn't.
Re:Sounds great (Score:4, Insightful)
Ironically, this approach will likely produce the opposite effect. For example, you can't really play Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 at all anymore, multiplayer. Why? Because the only way to play is to run a peer-to-peer game with whoever else happens to be playing. Chances are, they are all far away, and their internet connection sucks, so the game just sucks as a result, and you have to buy the newest version to actually get good connectivity.
If you're building your game to leverage server resources, players just connect to a datacenter, and get matchmade with other players there, likely pairing players with similar latency. Even if there are relatively few people playing, you'll probably get a pretty good experience, as at least one end of the connection for all players is pretty solid.
It seems like the whole point of the system is to actually address this very problem. Game publishers don't need to invest so much in hardware, and server resources are made available to games on a need basis. If you're game has 50 players, it'll probably do just fine with a server running on a virtual machine somewhere along with 20 other games on the same hardware. Microsoft could still screw up on the total capacity side when they're hit with a big release, but smaller games will likely benefit.
Bullshit (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:they don’t necessarily have to be updated (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
Re:Well, at least it's now confirmed. (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.
Re:It makes no sense to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Sorry kid (Score:4, Insightful)
It still smells like bullshit. They're going to provision $1000+ worth of hardware for every console? Yeah, yeah, load based demand over a pool, but still... Plus they're somehow going to deliver all of that capability over a DSL or cable connection? When developers and hardware makers are bitching and whining that the local bus inside the PC/console is "only" 2GB/s I find it difficult to believe that a trickle of 5-10Mbps of additional data to the system is going to help do anything very well.
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Insightful)
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).
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Even so, they might sometimes have something like 20% of their XBox customers playing at the same time (a guess based on subscriber numbers vs. peak usage of EVE Online).
Then they would have to put 3x 20% = 60% of the computing power of all XBoxes into their data centers. Now have a look at server prices vs. consumer electronics prices. Still looking like a good idea?
My guess is that we will see
-either a a fucking expensive subscription model for this cloud computing service
-or (more likely) a debacle like the recent Sim City launch
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Insightful)
Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
Exactly this. This whole approach is aimed at the elite (like me) who have an excellent connection and little concern about bandwidth usage.
Take a step back and remember that "this whole approach" is simply bullshit PR - there's 0% chance that any meaningful processing will be done in the cloud. MS has confirmed that the console only needs to check into the internet on the order of once a day, so they can't count on a constant connection. They therefore can't offload anything meaningful.
Furthermore, the implication that they'll offload something that requires a lot of processing that can't be done better on one of the 8 local cores or the local GPU necessarily means they're talking about graphics. Only graphics will stress this sort of system in a meaningful way. However, offloading any significant part of graphics processing isn't at all technically feasible.
Far too many of the comments on this story are taking MS at face value when it's obvious to anyone with any knowledge of games that the claim made by MS is simple obfuscation. As a few others have pointed out, this is the same thing as EA's vice president insisting that Sim City is highly dependent on vast server side resources even after it's been publicly demonstrated that the only thing servers do is enforce DRM.
The "cloud" will not and cannot have any meaningful affect on real time gaming beyond multiplayer or artificially imposed restrictions on single player.
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Insightful)
The difference with Microsoft is they already have a bunch of big freaking data centers (Azure) that they're renting out to other people, so on launch dates and other spikes, they can leverage that without it being dedicated to the Xbox.
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:4, Insightful)
First, I prefer PC games and gaming. However, you say:
Now you can buy games from Steam,GOG,D2D,Origin,Desura
as if that's a good thing. I started with Steam a long time ago due to the Valve first-party titles and so I've kept active there, but I have intentionally avoided all of the others. The last thing I want is to have half a dozen different "platforms" that I have to use to manage and play my games. This is in fact an argument in favor of consoles -- all your games in one place. Playing hide and seek with your games -- needing to remember that Mass Effect 1 is on a DVD from Amazon, Mass Effect 2 is on Steam, and Mass Effect 3 is in Origin -- is stupid.
YOU control the software
That doesn't really fit in with your previous statement. Games on PCs have often been more locked down with draconian DRM than their console counterparts. Console games can be resold or traded. While both of these points are in flux right now, for the time being it still feels like it's the console games that you really have "more control" over.
play pretty much any game out there, most with medium to high settings thanks to how long the consoles have held back the PC
Consoles haven't been holding back the PC nor made PC gaming "easier" to do on lesser hardware. What's done that is:
- Mobile gaming.
- Hardware outpacing (!) software for once. Intel's Core line of procs starting with Nehalem pretty much blew everything out of the water. Arriving around the same time was the (continuing) GPU revolution.
- Shitty desktop monitors. Desktop resolutions nor pixel densities haven't improved in the last decade due to the "HD" scam that's been pulled on consumers. It used to be that every couple of years the graphics card would be driving 60-80% more pixels because the resolution was bigger (not to mention the increased color depth). Now for the last 8 years or so everyone has had a 1080 display with no improvement in sight.
In either case, console and PC gaming aren't mutually exclusive nor dependant. Both will continue as long as they are each successful in their own regards. Which is preferable can sometimes depend on the context (sitting on a couch with friends or playing online with friends, etc). Neither needs to fail for the other to succeed.
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)