Rightisright
Banned
Oh no, it's not future proof yet. But there is a race on between MS, Google and Amazon to get it to that point. Microsoft doesn't want to give either Google or Amazon a head start.there is a problem with that, you are thinking of azure as some kind of magical future proof game streaming hardware that you only have to buy once and will works for everything
server need upgrades and game streaming servers need more upgrades, sony right now with their ps3 and ps4 data centers has better infrastructure than whatever MS can offer them for their streaming needs for PSnow why?, because you cannot expect to virtualize a PS3 on azure and be cost effective vs a rack with 8 cells and 8 RSX or a virtual PS4, azure is a cloud for a lot of services but most of them are not related to game streaming, you can add GPU power to your virtual machine but you can select between GPUs from Nvidia and AMD with different amounts of power they do that because not all the hardware in azure has the same procesing power in other words only a part of azure can run and stream games, what if you need raytracing? what if you need certain ram speed? what if you need hardware specific gpu extentions? how much of azure hardware can actually do that?, the point of virtualizing hardware is to not care about the hardware you just allocate more power on demand that works very well for business applications, database, video stream and webhosting that is good and is MS main business with azure but games and more specifically console games streaming require a console hardware to run properly that is why google mentioned the specs of the machines for stadia you can only run as many games simultaneously as machines with that specs you have, do you need more power for more complex games? then you have to distribute hardware and render part of the screen on another machine that is 2 machines for one game/user or you buy new and more powerful server which you eventually will do anyway and replace old ones with the exception that you cannot run more complex games than machines with powerful hardware you have
MS can spend a lot of money in azure right now(they need to for their business) but for game streaming only part of it will work, sony want to stream consoles games they dont need something as big as azure specially because most of azure wont work for their needs they can grow the data centers they have for game streaming as much as PSnow require and they can even wait until they truly need lot of data centers to buy modern hardware and at that point they can have as many modern gaming capable servers as MS
If cloud gaming takes off, then it's a three horse race.