I wish you could see the irony from where im standing.
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Jonathan Blow Criticizes MSs Claim of Increasing Servers to 300K, Calls It A Lie!
- Thread starter Miles Quaritch
- Start date
I wish you could see the irony from where im standing.
But that is true horror.
MidgarBlowedUp
Member
Haha I guess if you had a game with parades in it you could use the cloud to process the rain on them.
NullPointer
Member
If the game still plays at all.
So says someone that has an xbox controller as his avatar!
fuzzy.dunlop
Banned
omg... nintendos is toast
wow. was thinking the same thing. are we related?
Whipped Spartan
Member
B/C MS sent me a check to use the avatar. I'll change it to a PS4 pic. I plan on buying it too.
Ohh, then why attack Blow?, he is only pointing out the truth.
Until MS demo's ANYTHING that uses the technology how the hell does he know this is this the truth?
See Forza 5 and hopefully an explanation on what the cloud is doing in the game...then people can make actual decisions based on observation and not console warrior bullshit
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Why do we have to wait and see? MS has made a claim with no prior examples of it working, and no evidence it will work.
Whipped Spartan
Member
He is a tool. I've owned and supported every PS and XB system equally. Also I love Braid. One of my favorite games of this gen. Just seems like he is an attention whore and classless. I won't buy his games any longer. I don't like to feel like I am supporting someone who is so political about their business.
...because they have not actually shown the product yet (hint:e3)?
Pretty sure this is bullshit, but hey I'm willing to give it the benefit of the doubt until they actually demo the technology
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Exactly what was the show they had then where they unveiled and talked about the console?
they are not selling your PS4 and telling you "in next decade, our cloud will make PS4 40x more powerful!!!" (but not today, just buy PS4 and one day, we promise!)
Gaikai game streaming is not even made for PS4... it is being done for every device possible. Sure, it is possible to do it with PS4, but it makes more sense on PS3, TV, Xperia, etc, etc.
It is not hard to see the difference here.
King Tubby
Member
Yes, reasons. You say it like it's a dirty word. Screw logic, Microsoft has money!
Cloud processing is very promising and can open the door to some wonderful software, but given the state of internet infrastructure, the realities of rendering processes, and pesky little limitations like the speed of light, what Microsoft seems to be promising is unfeasible and will continue to be for some time.
Blame MS for making claims of effectively quadrupling the Xbox One's processing power. Rendering and latency-intensive procedures necessarily have to be involved for that to be the case.
Did you read it? That paper deals with MMORPG AI specifically for a reason; it's outlining a way for client devices to improve the computational ability of the server. This is because MMORPGs will have thousands of concurrently running AI routines that take a toll on the entire server architecture, so being able to distribute the computing tasks to client software will allow the total computational power devoted to those algorithms to scale with the number of users. This is effectively the opposite of what Microsoft plans to do with the Xbox One.
This is far less relevant when it comes to a single player game. How many concurrent AIs do single players deal with at a given time? How many can they even notice that the cloud becomes necessary to handle it, and how much computational power is that really going to require relative to the rendering and other latency-sensitive processes? In the MMO example the distributed processing and partitioning of AI routines serves a clear and necessary purpose, but when it comes to the opposite application it seems superfluous and unnecessarily expensive for Microsoft to expend their resources in such a fashion.
The simple fact of the matter is that the cloud hype is mostly marketing bluster, we know this because we know that the Xbox One is not required to be online at all times, but only once every 24 hours for a mandatory check-in. As such we know that the cloud cannot be relied upon by developers for incredibly intensive processes or else the product will degrade noticeably for users with varying or subpar internet connections. It seems like the applications of the cloud will be relegated to either superfluous flair that won't make a tremendous amount of difference (certainly not even doubling the Xbox One's processing capability) or games that rely upon it will necessarily be always-online like an MMO even if they are single-player, akin to the SimCity situation, and the performance of those games will depend at least somewhat on the quality of the client's internet connection. If anyone can explain why this isn't the case then I'd love to listen but I haven't seen any defense yet besides "They've spent a lot of money so there's gotta be something to it."
I clearly quoted Sony's PR babble to highlight they both will spew shit, but until they actually launch their products and show they technology you cannot say they are "lying". Or if you do at least spread the net a little wider
lovegames718
Banned
Sony Gakai service=Feasible
Microsoft cloud service=Totally bs and lies in regards to boosting graphics and performance 3xs in xbone.
Microsoft cloud service=Totally bs and lies in regards to boosting graphics and performance 3xs in xbone.
Brad Grenz
Member
That quote wasn't even accurate. Bad reporting there. Perry announced a build out of the Gaikai network that was targeted as being the fastest cloud gaming network in the world. He didn't say they already have it now. He didn't even say they definitely would have it once they were done. He expressed a goal. That's not "lying".
What MS has been saying about cloud computing, on the other hand, is shockingly duplicitous.
That's not what that means. Sorry for using a meme, that's my fault. That refers to nebulous, wrong, vague, improperly used, or irrelevant types of reasons. Basically reasoning that doesn't accomplish the task of supporting the thesis.
Microsoft has spoken of increasing the "power" of the console and lending computational help to things like lighting, physics, ai, etc. Specifically things not sensitive to latency, in the words of MS engineers.
What, why? If they offload tasks from the console it can use those cycles to do latency intensive tasks that it couldn't do otherwise. That's the indirect effect of this scheme.
The takeaway from that research was the methods employed to get around latency for tasks that aren't super sensitive to latency. There are absolutely implications for the type of cloud computing being described by MS since overcoming large turn-around times will be incredibly important. Even beyond specifics it's a good reminder that so called "common sense" regarding these types of things isn't worth counting on.
How are lighting and physics insensitive to latency?
Even in the case of lightmaps you would typically do them offline and put them on the disk (for instance vrad on source engine).
Not to mention lightmaps are multi-megabyte so even in a world where you could calculate them per-frame you wouldn't be able to send that much data per-frame.
There's a 16 msec window to complete each frame and that's usually tough enough even without sending data across a network for processing.
They specifically talk about things that don't need to be updated every frame. I can think of plenty of cases where calculations can be performed server side in relation to lighting that don't need to be repeated over and over for every frame. I think they referred to these as "up-front" calculations or some such and even beyond that I'm sure there are lighting and physics conditions that don't need to change with every frame.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Ok, if it's such an advantage, why can't the console spend 5 seconds doing those calculations up front?
It's not like the server is insanely more powerful then the console.
Regarding the other calculations, what percent do you actually think this will account for?
Why not use those 5 seconds to do something else instead?
I have absolutely no idea. Conceptually none of this is impossible, but until there are more details we can't quantify this benefit or even say for sure the benefit it realizable given their implementation.
Can you tell me some examples that use lighting? I've heard people say lightmaps but there is really no benefit to using the cloud for lightmaps compared to doing it offline and shipping it on the disk.
I've never programmed physics code outside of SAT theorem stuff so it's possible it's true. I only do rendering and network/streaming programming.
All of the examples I've seen so far (outside of AI) are things that could be pre-calculated at development time. Using a cloud would be slower.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
Why not use the CPU while the game is loading, it's not exactly busy during those 4+ seconds. I guess the point i'm trying to get at, If doing these calculations ahead of time was such an advantage, I would think it would have been done before, more frequently.
King Tubby
Member
Obviously, that would be assumed if we're talking about increasing a machine's processing power. My question is, how much of the processing load is really devoted to those latency insensitive tasks relative to latency-sensitive tasks in an average game? This bleeds into my other point, which is how noticeable will the cloud improvements be? I don't think the answer to either of those questions will support MS's claims as to the "power of the cloud" except when it comes to certain specially developed games that happen to be highly latency-insensitive to begin with.
This can only deal with certain computing loads. Will it make up for the difference in hardware performance between the Xbox One and PS4 to the end user, even in the perfect scenario where bandwidth and latency are no issue? How can it possibly do that when programmers need to account for worst-case scenarios with intermittently dropped connections or low speeds? Microsoft is introducing stratified gaming experiences to the console arena with this technology. Is that supposed to be a benefit?
There are a lot of questions with no or unsatisfactory answers. I'd like to hear them, whether from Microsoft or developers. But there are simply some facts about console gaming that I don't see Microsoft getting around no matter what the specifics of their implementation.
Lol, this is hilarious.
How is that not the same thing? It's a video game, not a movie. Gaikai is running the game (doing physics, AI, graphics rendering) and sending the video output to the console.
Iced_Eagle
Member
LOL! Winner.
Suikoguy
I whinny my fervor lowly, for his length is not as great as those of the Hylian war stallions
In the Microsoft method some of the calculations are sent to the server, all of the rendering is done on the console. Gaikai does everything on the server and streams it as a video.
The MS Method has nothing in use right now to compare it to.
If you think it is the same then you do not understand at all.
Gaikai is a rather broad spectrum of services and capabilities. I wouldn't be shocked to find Sony using their Gaikai server farms in the same capacity the MS cloud is used they just don't need to talk it up. MS is pushing this cloud thing aggressively because they have inferior hardware and need to come out of the gate on the offensive in order to get public favor.
It really is the "blast processing" of the current generation.
Obviously its not the exactly the same, but still involves server side computation being sent back to the client.
Truespeed
Member
Has the server count actually been confirmed. I've always assumed it was virtual because that's what the majority of servers in the cloud are. These unqualified numbers they're using are just going to bite them in the ass once the real numbers are discovered. Just use the real numbers and own it. These 300,000 servers and 5 Billion transistor count just makes you look like you're trying to hide something.
Truespeed
Member
Well, at least they can back up their bullshit with a cloud related world record.
Gaikai is an online service. We know it's online.
Xbone supposed to play offline games, but are forced to be online because of this unnecessary cloud crap.
Holy shit
But doing the whole thing remotely is a lot simpler, all it does is take commands and gives back video, unlike what MS is claiming to do which is only processing parts of things on the "cloud", sending the data back and having the local system integrate it someway into what it is doing locally.
ThisWreckage
Banned
They need to either put up or shut up. It sounds like another tales from the ass type scenario.
I think they already said that games with cloud support would always need an online connection. There are no offline modes for those.
UnluckyKate
Member
Wait, people really think the cloud based servers can enhance their graphics ?