"Of course PS4 can do Cloud Computing", says President of Sony'

[ctrl_alt_delete]

It will, but dedicated servers on multiple locations isn't exactly a big challenge, Valve for example has servers in almost every country in Europe, and Amazon has multiple locations too. It's all probably not as easy but dedicated game servers aren't a new thing.

 

true they're not a new thing, but devs get it free on xbox, dev's would have to pay for amazon or build their own.

[FlintyV]

It will, but dedicated servers on multiple locations isn't exactly a big challenge, Valve for example has servers in almost every country in Europe, and Amazon has multiple locations too. It's all probably not as easy but dedicated game servers aren't a new thing.

 

But are Sony doing it?

 

It doesn't seem like Sony have the infrastructure for it let alone the software. Have to remember even the most basic Gaikai stuff isn't happening at launch.

 

As I said it's all well and good saying they could but Microsoft are.

[MindTrickz]

I think you misunderstand the phrase and its usage here. It absolutely means something. It means that Microsoft is offering a whole lot of cloud compute resources (i.e. datacenters full of machines and a very advanced platform (Azure) for making efficient use of them. Sony has no such cloud computing platform to offer, let alone resources. Their best bet is to make a deal with Amazon (or maybe VMware) to offer something competitive with what Microsoft has.

 

Read up on the last 3 pages of discussion. I do not really feel like repeating everything I've so far discussed again.

[Crimson Rain]

CPU and GPU use the fastest  input/output available on hardware, and now Microsoft pretends it can send the same instructions to a server over WAN, execute them, send them back to your Xbox over WAN, and tells you this method has better performance. It's just completely absurd.

 

And then you have many Xbox One fans believing this and use it as their primary argument why the Xbox One will be better in bringing you the "next gen" and why the PS4 isn't.

 

If you do not understand how things work, it is better to ask instead of speculate and post wrong info as if it was right.

[AnDom]

All this "cloud" talk is giving me a headache, and is really disingenuous for them to make statements like "it will be X times more powerful due to the cloud".

 

The local hardware isn't going to get more powerful, unless you replace it... period.  People can argue this until they are blue in the face, but at the end of the day, you cannot magically make the physical hardware faster regardless of whether or not it is connected to the "cloud" or not.  You *can* supplement what it is doing by offloading calculations elsewhere, but that doesn't change the physical hardware is still as fast as it was before you started offloading work.

 

That said, lets say you start offloading these calculations... what then?  Realistically you can only offload calculations that are NOT time sensitive, unless you are in a situation where all players are affected by the same delay in timing.  This severely limits the utility of offloading these calculations to specific tasks, most of which will not translate into you seeing "X times more powerful" anything... besides if you need to push calculations up a pipe with 10-60+ ms latency both directions, how long is the calculation itself going to take?

 

People keep bringing up dedicated servers/persistent worlds.... well la de da, welcome to PC gaming in the 90's.  This is nothing new, and didn't make anything more "powerful".... your Quake II frame rate didn't double because you were on a dedicated server.  Realistically unless you were at the limits of your PC's performance, it really did nothing other then to create are more "even" experience for all the players involved.  As for persistent worlds... the general example is MMO's... while dedicated hardware was required for persistency, server side calculations for many things was not done because of limited hardware on the client, but rather because you couldn't "trust" the client to make those calculations (otherwise cheating would cripple you).

 

So no, Xbox One isn't magically becoming more powerful... it will be as powerful on launch day as the day it is finally declared dead.  You might get some novelty by pushing calculations server-side, but for the most important operations, this isn't realistic.

 

Finally, lets say you could do this... now you have a game that designed to run on a system that is doesn't even meet the required specifications.  You can no longer play this game without server side assistance, so loss of connectivity, server outage/reliability, latency, or service shutdown will keep you from playing.  Heck, most people don't even have reliable broadband at this stage of the game... it might not go totally down, but very few have a connection where latency/speed are not fluctuating (sometimes by large margins), and by design the networks couldn't' make this promise anyway.  How many publishers are going to want to live "beyond their means" with such a design, and the backlash that will come with it when it fails to function properly?

[Spike2013]

I'm getting a headache too I can see cloud having some benefits but also having some negatives I have a slow broadband an it's not going to get any faster for years.

This X times faster rubbish is a joke lol

[JonnyLH]

I haven't seen anyone in this thread with any software engineering knowledge to actually give some real knowledge to the situation. Everyone is basing their knowledge on cloud computing on literature found on tech enthusiast websites and not actual first hand technical knowledge of games development.

 

First things first, I'm a software engineer who's often worked on 2d/3d games professionally and in side-projects.

 

Just by using the cloud, the performance boost is subjective. Suddenly you're not going to see double digit boosts, it's not like the cloud magically gives your Xbox more RAM or a faster clock rate. Regarding game engineering, it creates a whole new way of thinking for the game developer. They now have to think about how local resources can be freed up by offloading mathematical calculations in the cloud. The cloud is as good as the developer makes it, it could involve generating static light maps for complicated backdrops, calculating mass AI entities which aren't player interacting or simply storing a world which is dynamically changing. It could be used how ever the developer wants it. 

 

For example, in a new GTA for instance, there's loads of random pedestrians walked around aimlessly. These people aren't player interacting, if their footsteps are delayed by 100ms would it matter? No they would simply be a step forward on the map. The calculations for these AI could be processed in the cloud, sent back down and shown without a real effect to the player. That then frees up resources for more frame related processing. Dynamic lighting, better collision detection etc etc.

 

Regarding dedicated servers, you aren't going to see a power boost in that area. The absence of being host isn't really going to lower the effort locally, so in power boost terms, you're looking at pretty much zero there. What it does allow is for publishers and development teams to include dedicated servers without the worry of cost/uptime/lifetime etc. That's business sense.

 

If developers use this technology to render graphical elements in the cloud like light maps, particles and shaders, you ARE going to see a very significant power boost. If a certain game has alot of its elements which aren't latency effected then you will see a 40x boost like mentioned from the 360. Little things like more grass on the hills, better smoke, lighting on guns. 

 

The term cloud here is basically server farming on a unprecedented level. Anyone stating they can just rent a couple of servers from Amazon are clueless. I've read some of the specifics around this and MS have made a new protocol to drive this technology and actually included hardware in the X1 to take the compression of the data away from the CPU cycles. To roll out a consumer device globally which uses the same server farm architecture on each box is groundbreaking in tech terms.

 

Sony can do cloud computing, and have been doing since the release of the PS3. Whereas this is a completely different form of cloud computing, albeit a very technical one. MS needed to give it a name which could be accepted by the average consumer but unfortunately its a very convoluted term.