The whole thing is Microsoft scrambling after seeing the PS4 specs, that it uses faster RAM and does more computations at a faster speed and shit. Pulling "the cloud" as a trump card usually "tricks" people who aren't in the know because it's a marketing buzzword that many layman folk don't really understand.
Even if 300,000 physical servers were adding to the graphical power, you wouldn't want that. You would need an internet connection constantly or your game would look worse than it could, you would see compression artifacts, with some textures and shit looking like a sub-HD Youtube video, and if your Internet was capped you would eat up data rather quickly.
It just looks worse and worse for Microsoft, but what I wonder is if ordinary people who don't visit gaming websites and do their research are aware of what lurks beneath this machine. I foresee many angry people who don't understand why their game has to install, why it asks for a fee to be paid when they bring a game to their buddy's house, why it won't work without the Kinect even though they don't have the space for it/don't care for it. Even with people like us, unfortunately I can imagine this still being successful. We "rallied" against always-on DRM, season passes, microtransactions, on-disc and day-one DLC before, and now we just accept that shit as being a normal part of the industry that we'll take but wish it wasn't there. It's no wonder Microsoft has the gall to believe they can push it even farther than all that.
He's probably right that it wont do much to improve graphics or processing speed on demanding games. The PCIe slot on a motherboard usually used to host a graphics card can funnel 8gb/s through a shared parallel bus architecture. On the other hand, our internet connection is typically much lower than that as just about anyone who has done a download can attest: The average US broadband speed is currently 6.6 mb/s. So, it comes down to the question of just how in the world does Microsoft plan to improve graphics fidelity using the cloud with less than 1/1000th the bandwidth of a graphics port?
They might be able to stream input information back to a server that is running a game and then stream a feed of what is happening in the game back to the player, but there would be a lot of lag problems trying to do it that way. Likewise, a system like that would really start going the way of "pay $60 for a service", as we wouldn't even have a physical disc on our end anymore.
So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.
It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.
Honestly, it's not hard to stop and think for two seconds and realize that at the very least, their talk of using cloud computing to triple or quadruple the power of the console is utter bullshit. Even if they dedicate the hardware on the server side to technically equate to four Xbone's total, you're still limited by internet connection speed. You can't just offload information from the Xbone to the servers the way the hardware inside your machine talks to each other because the bandwidth on an internet connection is a tiny fraction of the speeds the hardware in the box uses. You'd never be able to transmit data back and forth between your box and the cloud to see any measurable performance improvement.
So the only way it would actually amount to anything is if much of the game is run on the servers themselves and streamed to you, which I doubt will ever happen except in the occasional online only game because you're basically talking about requiring an always online connection and treading into Diablo 3/Sim City territory. I'm not sure how many sane developers are still willing to go there, let alone try and code a game that runs partly on servers and partly on the gamers machine. It would be a programming/networking nightmare frankly and I don't know of any game that really attempts to offload most of the graphics or other processing jobs to servers.
Point is, yes, Microsoft outright lied when they said they could quadruple the power of the Xbone using the cloud. I know less about the prospect of them running 300k servers with many of them being virtual, so I'd leave that to other people to debunk, but given their penchant for distorting the truth and making stupid decisions lately, I wouldn't put it past them to be lying about that too.
Can't speak for everyone else but personally I'm not a big fan of his. He has a tendency to talk like he's a big name in the industry despite only having one game (that I feel was okay at best) to his credit. As for the topic at hand I can't help but feel this is all just so he can pull an "I told you so" when/if someone with the actual technical knowledge comes out and proves it's true.
Generally when you go to call bullshit on something, it is quite often favorable to have the know-how to ACTUALLY prove it is bullshit, otherwise you may as well just be a looney in the street raving about the sky falling.
True, but I actually think the pretentious wanker actually has a point in regards to cloud servers increasing hte power of the Console. If anything, since it will only affect consoles that are able to use the cloud servers, their 'boost' will not affect them , weakening MS's claims.
Also, I figure it would be slightly MORE draining having to keep checking the cloud server is working and saving/loading from there. I am probably wrong on this, but this is my interpretation of events.
I feel like this is probably true though. Anyone remember when EA claimed that a lot of the processing calculations for Sim City occured server side, then when someone did hijack the code to create an offline mode it was relatively simple and proved that it wasn't the case.
I mean you could do server side image processing, but... if it's meant to provide "Improved" graphical processing (which I assume is in comparison to it's competitors), then I'd have to be a bit suspicious.
So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.
It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.
Blow is a known blowhard who likes to talk without any real substance. No, not talk. Rant. Essentially, he's a gamer who rants about stuff with no real basis who gets credibility because he made Braid.
I'd like to have the capability to put out a hit indie game. Then, any stupid thing I said would be news. I'd screw with gaming media SO HARD.
Actually no, people don't have a reason to hate him. I haven't seen any reason that is more valid than my subjective 'dislike' of game development houses that don't cater to my platform of choise or people that I don't understand.
There, I said it. People hate him because they don't understand him. Not that I try to defend his words, in many cases he has a vastly different view on the whole gaming genre than most people do but fuck, more often than not people clearly don't get what he is saying.
It's because he's made one mediocre game and acts like he's the savior of the game industry and the only one presenting original concepts. Coming from someone with only a 2D platformer under his belt I'm not sure I would say he's offered anything new.
I don't think he's wrong in this though. Sure, cloud gaming got potential to assist hardware, I tested out some free trials from that company that went bankrupt that provided cloud gaming... It was OK.
However as someone has already stated, what does this mean for the games? If we can improve performance will we also require it? If that's the case then Microsoft pretty much is using always on DRM, but it will also drain a whole lot of bandwidth just to screw with people who's got capped bandwidth.
It's funny how people seem to hate Jonathan Bow for saying this. He's saying the exact same thing as the rest of the internet. But he's not anonymous. He has a face so he can be hated. Fuck that, I agree with him.
So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.
If Microsoft was running this with 300K physical servers doing lighting and physics, it will still be bogged down by the time any popular game utilizing was released for the Xbone. Let alone latency. I agree with Blow in the sense that this is mostly a marketing department rolling their heads around on a keyboard.
The claim is rubbish even with the most basic knowledge of computer architecture. Most lighting and even physics now is done on shaders on the GPU. Are we just going to do it in software on server or shared GPU(s), with internet latency and doing it on most likely conventional x86 hardware? This claim is fucking retarded, its quicker to just do a second rendering pass than it is to send all the information over the internet let alone the scheduling overhead then to do the bloody computation.
Why aren't people discussing the actual hardware advantages of the Xbone? Because the marketers want you to know about the retarded shit they came up with rather than what the engineers put thought and effort into.
Oh, Microsoft's claims are pretty much definitely bullshit, but Blow isn't saying anything beyond what anyone with even the remotest knowledge of how computing works could tell you.
Which in effect is him trying to debunk unproven bullshit with more unproven bullshit - he even admits himself he doesn't have the technical know-how to explain why they're talking out of their asses. It's like fighting fire with fire, except that for this you're going to need a shovel.
Adam Jensen said:
It's funny how people seem to hate Jonathan Bow for saying this. He's saying the exact same thing as the rest of the internet. But he's not anonymous. He has a face so he can be hated. Fuck that, I agree with him.
Oh, it's not that he's wrong, it's just that he's saying exactly the same as the rest of the internet, and is a big waste of the extra attention heaped upon him.
Well, noone claimed Cloud gaming will improve graphics to begin with.
Physics, AI, Offsite calculation - sure. Graphics - not possible. You can imrpove graphics offsite if tyou stream them, but thats not clouding.
Kargathia said:
So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.
It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.
His last name is "Blow". Acting like a dick is predetermined.
BigTuk said:
Seriously; cloud computing will never enhance game play, it will only slow it down. Don't believe, how laggy do things get when you're on a 20 man raid in WoW? How much does your fps drop?
Nopt sure about WOW and thier programming sincei dont play one, but in other games i often run with a pack of 30 to 200 people and experience no lag-jumps or what is popularly called "rubberbanding".
FPS drops are solely based on your computer calculation - your computer cant manage to calculate that much. if anything Cloud gaming would help with exactly that - FPS drops. your attacking it from a wrong angle mate.
I still have no idea what a Cloud is, although I confess I find it to be a pleasant image, but from reading some of the more knowledgeable posts on this thread, all I can picture now is that gaming on the new consoles is going to be like watching a video on Youtube when the servers are overloaded.
Am I going to end up sitting watching that fucking circle of dots chase itself while the rest of my level buffers?
So the Xbone's 8 core CPU isn't able to handle the load placed upon it by the software? That is not confidence in a product.
Here's a fact; Less than 5% of the world's population (350 million or so) have the internet speed necessary for cloud computing to be feasible for what Microsoft thinks it will be capable of.
"I'm Jonathon Blow, and Explosions are shit. Let's have a look at some colors!"
OT: I dunno, I bet Microsoft could do it (Host that many servers). Now, hosting that many servers and letting them all work is a different thing entirely. But I bet they could host 300,000 servers (With most of them lagging or being terrible).
It's SimCity all over again. Why would they spend the amount of money required to boost the performance of your computer for free? They wouldn't.
I have no doubt that Microsoft has the infrastructure to crunch that much data. But I refuse to believe that they can afford to do it without a fee that hardly anybody would be willing to pay.
Well, noone claimed Cloud gaming will improve graphics to begin with.
Physics, AI, Offsite calculation - sure. Graphics - not possible. You can imrpove graphics offsite if tyou stream them, but thats not clouding.
Microsoft already claimed they'd be able to quadruple the power of the Xbone using cloud computing. This is patently bullshit on any level though. You're not going to be able to offload any meaningful calculations from the game install on someone's console to servers since the bandwidth provided by even the fastest internet connections doesn't compare to what you get in the machine being used for the CPU, RAM, GPU, and other components to talk to each other. Only way it might work at all is if you're running some major calculations only on the server side and sending the results to the players machine, but you're still looking at latency becoming an issue for most people, as well as it being a fucking technical nightmare to code a game that runs most of it's code on separate machines.
I don't see most developers using this at all, even if it is possible. At best, you might get some online only games doing it, but even then, take a look at what happened to Diablo 3 or Sim City at launch. And they weren't even running that much on the actual servers. Most developers don't even have the resources to attempt what they did (and failed at), let alone to try and scale it up to even more insane levels.
Someone sounds bitter, seems like a non-story. I guess the real secret to this profession is to turn two or three sentence comment into a full page article.
Topic could have read:
Jonathan Blow Bitter Over Microsoft
Jonathan Blow refutes Microsoft's claims on Xbox One. Claims, "Bullshit. I don't know how exactly but bullshit anyways"
I'm just going to post this again, as it's relevant:
thesilentman said:
The "Cloud" can be used like this, but only for real data crunching. If it's for on site programs, forget it. I'd find the chat that I had with DoPo over this in the Linux group, but I can't find it for some reason. I will update if I do.
Main point? MS is a bunch of twats for thinking this. True data crunching is really the only practical reason, and I don't think MS wants games to stream at 2 MB/s from Xbox to Xbox. -.-
DoPo said:
Welp, sharing a random thought I had - it's about possible future for Linux gaming. How Linux can suddenly be Up There? with other platforms, on equal footing when it comes to playing stuff. And I don't know why I didn't think of it before but - streaming games. Yep, it's that easy - stream the games and it doesn't matter which platform you play them on.
And Linux already has that covered and has had it for...decades. OK, technically UNIX but whatever, Linux can do it too - this entire idea of streaming stuff is how stiff already operates. You don't have to be on your own machine to do stuff, you could just as well just have keyboard and a screen and get your session over SSH from another server. Or have an X session running on another machine but shown on your screen. Or numerous remote desktop variations. It's a complete non-issue to get a game displayed to us and send back control inputs, the only thing is network speed and a good enough game server to give us the performance. Network is being sorted out for us (technology marching on), so we only have to worry about what runs the games.
I've seen talks about streaming games (and there is OnLive, still, I thing, but dunno how good it is) but never actually connected to Linux or mentioned that we have the facilities to do it just lack some tech to support it properly. And it does seem like a viable direction to expand in - never heard much talk about that either. Get a beefy machine to run the games for you and you won't need specific consoles/PCs/whatever in the house since it can direct the output anywhere you want it to, on multiple screens if you wish and the controller just needs to be "whatever fits the game". So can cut out ports in one fell swoop - there needs to be just one version of the game.
I understand that there would also be difficulties but...it's still too little discussed thing, I believe. There is only OnLive but it's just...there - rarely if ever do I hear about it. When some 4G technologies were being discussed there was a brief mention of "Oh, that means you'll be able to stream games on mobile phones" and...that's about it, really. Now with PS4 we have a brief mention of streaming games but no real big hubbub of the possibilities. Just bizarre.
@DoPo: I thought it'd be a pretty viable thing, or at least it will be in the near future, with a device sort of like Ubuntu phone's docking. You load up your OS via device to a screen, keyboard and mouse combo with a dock and from there are able to play any sort of media, high end games as well.
Though, last I heard the major hurdle was internet connections? I attempted to try OnLive and Gaia but my flash package wasn't up to date -_-
@Lucem712: Internet connections are on their way to becoming a non-issue...well, OK not everywhere at all times but there have been places with stable 10Mb/s or so download speeds for a decade. Furthermore, you won't care much for internet connection if you deploy it over LAN at home and my impression is that everybody and their dog has easy access to home LAN solutions. And for, like, at least 5 years home wirelesses have been popular. It's a bit limited, yeah, but it's there, it can be used.
@DoPo: Streaming and web-based games is how I see Linux growing as a viable alternative to Windows or da Mac. Sooner or later, it won't matter what most of us need to do as it will all be in the high and mighty cloud. I already see Google Docs up there, and a nice group word editor called Etherpad doing this. The future is heading more towards streaming and the almighty "cloud", something that pisses me off personally, but I respect in a sense.
@thesilentman: Well...cloud is something else I've been musing about. It's not a bad idea, quite good in fact, and it sort of feels like a golden hammer...which isn't as good. However, it does have a great potential and for anybody working in technology, I'd suggest to go and start getting familiar with it. Myself included. For good or bad, it should become more and more relevant as you observed.
But at any rate I had an...interesting idea the other day - P2P cloud computing. Which has been around for a while in a way (well, all those "loan us CPU to compute a cure for cancer/Einstein's theorems/etc") but you could grow it out into an actual P2P computing. So like torrents but instead of using the network's hard drives, you can also use CPU as well. So more or less, you can loan CPU power to others ("seeding") and claim some back later ("leeching"). It's of limited usefulness but it can work in some situations. There are ways to do it, there are obstructions, to but it is possible. But then I realised it'd just a giant botnet to be operated by mostly anyone. Ugh, not a pleasant thought.
@thesilentman: Don't you know those projects about solving theorems or cancer research and stuff? How they work is you install their software and then specify how much CPU you want to give them - you could go for 10% or 80%, if you wish. Nowadays you can happily give them a core or two to use, I suppose, the first time I encountered them was around when WoW started out, so 2005-2006 when multicore CPUs were almost unheard of for normal users. But anyways, once you specify how much processing they can use, they'll just feed your computer small chunks of data to be processed and when finished they just get the result back. Wash, rinse, repeat. It's distributed computing really similar to the cloud but...not the cloud. Here is one I remember from back then. You can extend the idea to a P2P network, too - feed others the processing you can't do, they'll do it for you then spit back the results and voila. In the downtime you get fed processing requests.
It's not useful for all things, say, if you're playing a game you really need that data NOW and latency isn't really an option, however if you have to crunch through large volumes of data it can really speed things along, assuming, of course, you can split off the data in discrete chunks. Presumably each of these would need some time to be processed, so each could be a complex mathematical formula, for example or maybe you have a batch of images which need some automated manipulation that just takes time. Of course, you could just distribute the bruteforcing of a password or even a DDoS.
@thesilentman: Yeah, not every type of computation would lend itself well to parallelisation but if it does, then it'd just be useful to have it.
I remember one guy giving a talk on the CUDA technology which allows you to run your software on nVidia cards. Now, even if you have, like 8GHz CPU, some software just doesn't need power, it needs more processes and the video card has that in spades - at the time (three years ago) you could easily pick up a card with 128 cores which would run any CPU to the dust with sheer parallelisation power. He had rewrote some software that simulated...earthquakes or volcano eruptions - one of the two, but some science lab somewhere was studying them and providing warning for a nearby area (I believe it was somewhere in Africa). So basically, they were in a high risk region and when the sensors picked up something that could possibly indicate the disaster, they'd run the software to see where and how it'd most likely hit. Problem is that on a normal CPU (well, probably not off the shelf but a bit more beefy). While the rewritten application, utilising some normal nVidia card, was still not realtime (he showed a demo - it advanced with about a frame or two a second) it would at least finish in just a few minutes as opposed to the 5-8 hours or so, the original needed.
So yeah. I'm pretty passive here and decided to listen more than suggest any ideas, but this can probably shed some light on something as it talks about the method that MS is trying to put into practice. I don't see it working after DoPo explained it, and after some further thought, I had to agree.
Any thing you guys want to discuss on this from the technological side? Just join us in the Escapist Linux group here. We're pretty lenient and all, but we can talk for hours on tech. And we have too. :-D
On site calculations (physics and AI) will not work for this due to the streaming that's involved. As fast as we have Internet and other networking today, nothing beats RAM, a good hard drive, a good CPU, and a good GPU.
You know, which all happen to be in a games' console. Or a PC, MS. Just pointing that out...
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