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.
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Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Interesting)
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,
I have a ton of money and incredible broadband, and I still think that Microsoft is giving me the finger with the Xbox One.
Jim Sterling is still going to buy One. (Score:5, Funny)
Because he has a ton of money and incredible broadband and loves to give middle fingers too!
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)
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).
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Re:Does this actually work? (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Does this actually work? (Score:5, Interesting)
It won't fix his problem ; it's usually an overloaded local router. I got to the point where mine was giving out 150ms pings just for one hop - it didn't have enough CPU and RAM to deal with the all the connections being thrown around by torrent-seeding media sharers.
Broadband is all set up for consumption - downloading your content like a good little consumer. It's not set up for everyone being a server of dozens of connections.
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.
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Believe it or not, Microsoft is not full of complete fucktards who need Captain Obvious from the internet to explain how to build & size a data center at an appropriate scale to serve the needs of their customers.
And what, EA and Blizzard are full of complete fucktards? Because they couldn't handle it.
Here's the thing you aren't understanding: anyone can build a datacenter with enough power to handle that. If you want to throw money at the problem, there's an easy solution. The hard part is building a datacenter that can handle the load while at the same time being profitable. And if they are going to err, you can bet they will err on the side of being more profitable.
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)
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
They will NEED all that power, (Score:3, Interesting)
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" [schneier.com]
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 p
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?
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Actually, I believe offloading the game to the cloud can do much better than increasing the amount of CPU power for the AI. It allows you to create the largest collection of gamelogs ever. Properly analysing the gaming pattern could lead to a self improving AI. Then you could test the qualities of the AI against real player to make sure your predictions are correct. The potential is huge, "will it be realized?" is a different story of course.
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You don't even need a server crash for this to go tits-up. For the kind of cloud service they're talking about to work properly, you need a very, very high bandwidth and low-latency net connection and, assuming you want to play for more than a few hours a month, no monthly bandwidth limit.
My connection meets those criteria, but I'm willing to pay well above the average rate for my connection. The average connection is still some way short of it.
So in reality, any developer who takes advantage of that addit
if they are not sending video data like on live (Score:2)
if they are not sending video data like on live then you likely will not need high bandwidth and eat cap fast. Also lag / ping times will not need to be very low.
The big lag issues with on live is the control lag.
FPS and RTS games are ok with good lag times and don't need super low ones.
In Fairness (Score:2)
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.
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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 [investorplace.com] or dumber [siriwiki.net] sometime after launch? Not trolling, just asking - siriously :-)
In other words: Past Performance is No Guarantee of Future Results
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The EA debacle with Sim City had everything to do with their activation and matchmaking servers being unable to handle the load. It was very poor planning on the part of EA.
The cloud computing that MS is talking about with the XBox One occurs once you are already in-game and is an offloading of certain resource computations which the local unit *can* do itself. But if there is a good internet connection available then the offload of certain tasks to 'cloud' computing will augment the game by freeing up loca
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.
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It still smells like bullshit. They're going to provision $1000+ worth of hardware for every console?
Seriously? Since this is slashdot I would have figured more people understood how capacity planning works... this is the 3rd post I have responded to with the same misunderstanding...
They are going to add capacity so that every *active* Xbox that needs the resources will have it. In the case of Xbox Live, that will likely be somewhere between 1-5% of Xbox Live users at any one time. Is there some infinitesimal chance they could underestimate? Sure. But they have years of data and capacity planning expe
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The cloud computing that MS is talking about with the XBox One occurs once you are already in-game and is an offloading of certain resource computations which the local unit *can* do itself.
If local unit *can* do it already, why would I want to offload it to the 'cloud'?
I mean, I understand it from Microsoft's point of view, they only want to fuck over customers, but what benefits would I have, when my local unit *can* do this already?
It'll free some CPU/GPU cycles on my local unit so that I can see more ads or what?
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EA lied about the cloud processing. Either hacked to run offline or loosing your connection, Simcity still ran fine.
The bigger problems with Simcity, even more than the opening day server Charlie Foxtrot, are that they nerfed it compared to #4 to try to get a bigger audience and the half assed pathing agent which screwed everything up and the online saves.
- Former Simcity fan
Simcity all over again (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
World of Warcraft (Score:4, Interesting)
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Simcity is not an MMO. They tried to say it was, but it isn't.
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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.
of course. but I would hate waiting in queue to play starcraft 3. waiting in queue for warcraft was pretty shitty too.
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World of Warcraft likely does server side processing.
Now there's an understatement. :)
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MMOs do it that way because they have to. Otherwise they'd be hacked to hell and gone--Diablo I all over again. And even then they have to be careful. A large part of the old Final Fantasy XIV's performance problems can be chalked up to trying to do too much on the server side. That's the main reason they had to do a relaunch; the problems required a complete redesign to solve.
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Simcity was just a botched attempt to do what mmo do.
No. SimCity was a blatant attempt to impose DRM through the absolute lie that powerful calculations were carried out on the server.
Simple logic would tell you that it was a lie: To claim the servers offered more power than the desktop machines is to imply EA/Maxis stood up a server farm that was "more powerful" than gamers' home rigs. Even without the GPU, you've got to figure that'd be a couple of hundred dollars (let's say $200). Figure on gamers using the game at least 20% of the time during the launch m
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.
Re:Well, at least it's now confirmed. (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Not sure if your goal was trolling, or if you legitimately hadn't read up on it, but Microsoft stated clearly that, while games *could* require full-time Internet, the intent is for the cloud resources to be used for latency-insensitive augmentation of the game, so they'll work fine offline. But that's true of games already. Some require being online while playing, some work better while online (like Borderlands 2), and some don't care.
All this is saying is they're going to scale their regional Azure datacenters at 3x the rate of Xboxes being sold.
Facts aren't really the goal of Microsoft-related discussions on Slashdot, though.
Re:Well, at least it's now confirmed. (Score:5, Funny)
Shut up Ballmer.
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No they are leaving it up to the developers to make that decision. Slashdotters are so fast on the negative side of things. This is a meaningless topic for games that are already online and for any that need the processing power then maybe you need the internet to play that good of a game.
blahblahblahblahblah.
you do understand why they're touting this? because ps4 hardware is faster.
of course ps4 games could rent time from aws as well.
heck, any game could do this on any platform.
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I don't know about that, the PS3 had better hardware than the 360 but it still didn't blow away the 360 in north american sales. I think if they were going to save face on something they would be better off to look at, at least changing the name.
I think the difference here with the cloud computing is that the developers can rely on Microsoft themselves to provide the cloud computing. This would be good for smaller developers. Where as larger developers are going to have their own solution anyways like yo
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.
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.
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Indeed. If it were 4 times the power of every Xbox sold, why not just pack all those extra processing units into each Xbox and skip the obvious latency problems?
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My question was rhetorical.
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Then why ask it?
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If it were 4 times the power of every Xbox sold, why not just pack all those extra processing units into each Xbox and skip the obvious latency problems?
1. Not all people will be playing at the same time, so you can reduce the hardware costs by only paying for half as much hardware (say).
2. If you put the extra processing in the Xbox, you couldn't force people to buy a new game by shutting down the servers for the old one.
Just about everything Microsoft has done since Windows 7 seems to be based around lockin in and monetization. This looks no different.
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Having 4x the power would, naively, cost 4x as much. Having 3x extra power in the cloud means it can be used for other things when you turn your xbox off. Like, boosting the power of other xboxes. Many people probably use their console at most an hour a day on average. So you could get 24 times as much out of processing power in the cloud.
That said, eww. Good thing I wasn't planning to buy an Xbox anyway.
Re:I call bullshit (Score:4, Interesting)
Alternately, Microsoft may be intending to do something along the lines of OnLive; that is, render the game on the server (with it's "4-times-the-power-of-a-single-XBoxOne" servers) and then stream the output to the player.
Of course, you still have tremendous latency issues, unless you stick those servers in every ISP across the country (something Microsoft could afford far better than OnLive). With the increased CPU power of the new console, the stream could better compressed, resulting in better picture quality as well.
There are a number of advantages to this for both Microsoft and the developers. Games would no longer be limited by the hardware of the console, for instance, which would not only mean better graphics and larger worlds, but longer life expectancies for the consoles since its hardware doesn't need to be replaced as often (who needs faster GPUs and bigger HDDs when everything is "in the Cloud"?)\. Microsoft can keep selling the same basic model for years, with only minor tweaks and chrome, negating the need for expensive R&D. Publishers get better control of their products; it kills used game sales, they can obsolete older games to create a market for the newer versions, and they can data-mine the players. Plus, Microsoft gets paid for running the servers!
For the customer, there are fewer advantages, of course. But what corporation really cares about what the customers want these days?
Server downtime (Score:3, Interesting)
Sounds amazing! I can't wait for all the articles about hammered servers on release and server maintenance.
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...and wait for a leap year or February 29th - that will be fun.
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It will be funnier than the EA episode, because all the titles will stop working every time one of them is a hit.
Good thing I won't buy one of those...
Sounds great (Score:5, Insightful)
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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.
With MS throwing the hat in on stuff that doesn't make them a profit, i figure a year at the most for most games.
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.
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However, there are a number of good games that are not online multiplayer or have core functionality that isn't online mulitplayer. Under this system, they will not be able to be played 10 years from
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I agree the 'processing power' part sounds a bit silly - I'll be waiting to see if that's anything other than like...streaming?
Most consumer internet connections don't compete with those at datacenters, in both speed and quality. Having one end of the connection at a datacenter makes a huge difference. I played shooters for years, and when you're playing on a server you get a consistent experience that is better than all but only the best of matchmade games going over p2p. The host can drop, their connec
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It is a good comparison. SNES never had to be online, a
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
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I'm not sure if you're kidding with the 2GB monthly cap, we're talking about cable and DSL connections here, not phones.
I do know that my monthly cap is around 30GB though, so Xbox one is not a valid option when they announce bullshit like this. My quota is already allocated to Netflix in low-quality mode. That tells you a lot about ISPs in Canada when Netflix has to add a third, lower-quality setting just for us.
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Nope they have 2 gig caps. I used to play with them in WOW and they would have to stop raiding for a few weeks until the cap reset on their cable.
Re:In other words... (Score:4, Interesting)
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. What the gaming industry is failing to take into account is that a large part of their target market is the working poor.
Someone else in this item brought up World of Warcraft and SimCity as examples of client-server games (Diablo III is another example of a single user game that should never have had a server). We all know how well the Diablo launch and SimCity launches went. Even WoW fails in certain circumstances. (I can't tell you how many times I've had WoW raids fail because the redneck tanking in Texas drops carrier. I don't know who the ISPs are in San Antonio, but it seems that even the mildest thunderstorm takes them out.)
Leaving games unplayable because of poor infrastructure or outages is not going to make people happy, we have tons of examples in the past. Why Microsoft thinks they're going to have a different experience with this is beyond me.
I think that eventually this kind of architecture will have enormous potential, but I don't see that we have the market penetration of sufficient high-quality, high-bandwidth networking.
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.
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When you write " XO" as short hand for Xbox One, my first thought was it looks like the emoticon "XD" for Rolling on the Floor Laughing. Then I thought "that's what MS must be doing thinking of how dumb the people that are going to buy into this are and how much money their going to take home because of it."
After that bit of a laugh I though actually it looks more like a emoticon for someone with thei
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Always on. And what happens when you have a shit internet connection?
I guess if you have a shit internet connection you shouldn't buy and play online games?
The problem is that "online" and "connection" mean different things to different people. Apparently my relatively crappy 10Mbps connection is significantly better than most of the gaming community.
(I always have a little giggle that I get better ping times from Eastern Canada to a server in California then the average Texan.)
Marketing (Score:5, Funny)
They promise the cloud
But their promises are vapour
Terminals: Wave of the Future (Score:3, Insightful)
So by "Power" they mean "Dependence on Mother Microsoft"
NOPE
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Yes. By power, they mean theirs, not yours.
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Please mode parent AC up. Welcome to the Dumb Terminal 3.0 era (1.0 terminals, 2.0 = Network computers)
they don’t necessarily have to be updated ev (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...
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?
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It would be like installing/uninstalling an HD mod in realtime, pretty much, but only HD textures for, say, cloth textures, or whatever.
If the textures are too big to fit on a bluray disc then they are too big to transfer across the internet for every play on any North American internet connection.
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So, the game must run localy, if you use a network resource, you can't depend on it, and the game must adapt to losing it any time. Like programming a supercomputer! With the 10x workload that comes with it, and 100x the cost, because 99% of the developers simply can't write code like that.
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.
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Given xbox gamers' tendency to explode, I'd say rebus.
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where did you hear that the camera and mic can't be disabled at all? MS hasn't said, yet. all i've seen is people misreading what is stated
Camera, no. I haven't heard specifically. However, as to the mic: "The new Kinect is listening for a specific cue, like 'Xbox on.'" [polygon.com]. When it's "off", it's still listening. Combined with their camera-counting-people DRM patent and the fact that - as far as I know - you can't run the XBox One without the Kinect, I'm not eager to take the gamble.
Yes, "Here's a gaming console with a camera and mic you can't unplug that's listening when it's off." is not the same statement as "Here's a gaming console with a ca
It makes no sense to me. (Score:3)
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?
Re:It makes no sense to me. (Score:5, Insightful)
We'll here Ballmer's swan song (Score:2)
Questions (Score:2)
Cloud Really? (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.
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.
They think it's 2030 already. (Score:2)
Re: (Score:3)
Sony and MS thinks everybody lives in a world where the connection is great, never drops and has awesome upload speeds.
To be fair, Sony does live in that world. It's called "Japan". Not sure what Microsoft's excuse is.
and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better (Score:2)
and the PS4 will have faster system ram and better? cpu?
the PS4 will have sheared ram at video ram speeds. Xbox shared ram at only DDR3.
What do they mean with it? (Score:2)
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
Re: (Score:3)
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.
Whats the point of getting a console anyways (Score:2)
Unless... (Score:2)
You have crappy, slow, or intermittent Internet, like 65%+ of the country does. Then I guess you're SOL and won't be able to play the $80 game you just bought, and won't be able to sell it either.
Yeah, this is going to work out sooo well. It simply amazes me that no one in a position of power at Microsoft can see how retarded this plan is.
Cloudy daze (Score:2)
The slowest part is my Internet connection (Score:2)
The part I just can't see is what do I need "computed" on a server which will take longer to calculate locally? My biggest problem with the Internet is that it is the slowest part of all my computing needs. I don't buy this 3X faster crap! They can't even put 1X as fast per user equipment currently why does anybody expect that in the "FUTURE" that it will be any different?
This is just a bunch of marketing crap so they can get free press. When it comes out it will be as lame as the Wii U is today. Microsoft
smokescreen for DRM (Score:3)
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.
Re: (Score:2)
Actually a good buddy of mine is one of the more derpy folks you could run into, plays nothing but assasins creed 3, madden, fifa, nhl games etc.
He won't be getting one of these new consoles because of the internet connection.
Shit, he doesn't have a landline or cable TV and the only reason he has an internet connection at all is basically netflix and downloading movies. If the XBox was a bit more open so you could use it as a general purpose entertainment center and print the odd PDF or something, connect,
Re: (Score:2)
I'm not too sure what they mean by this...
that they average the amount of players they think will be playing at any one time and use that to add servers to the microsoft cloud(that they have anyways and are selling parts off anyways, though people seem to prefer amazon & others more. you can even rent a linux server from them that resides in that cloud if you want to).
so me thinks it's more like 1/6th of a server per xbox one.
Re: (Score:2)
Within 15 years? Aren't you optimistic!
Re: (Score:2)
I fear if they're going to start off assuming all of this extra power in the cloud, they might be unplayable within the first 15 days.
This just screams as something which is going to experience major problems on day 1, and will leave loads of people without a usable system.
I have no interest in having my games handled in the cloud, and I definitely won't be getting an XBox which wants access the network as it sees fit -- I tried that once, got ads in games for my trouble, and subsequently disconnected it f
Re: (Score:3)
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.