The Big Bad Console Thread - Sway your Station with an Xboner !

Asherah

Silver Knight of the Realm
287
38
Technically he could be right! The architecture could be a generation ahead even if it gets left in the dust in terms of performance by a current gen high end gaming PC. Obviously, if that is the case the wording is intentionally deceptive.
 

Abefroman

Naxxramas 1.0 Raider
12,593
11,918
"These next-gen platforms create dynamic, living worlds," he said. "Your game could change overnight depending on actions by other gamers around the globe.

Oh god. MMO hype pr bullshit has made it's way to console pr vernacular.
 

Wombat

Trakanon Raider
2,150
887
Technically speaking, PCs with more, lower speed cores are what the industry will move to, just from cooling and power consumption standpoints; better integrated video will eat into the low end graphics card sales.

That those statements apply to the traditional gaming market that buys "real games" is another story.
 

Borzak

Bronze Baron of the Realm
25,365
33,032
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Xbo...ton,22775.html

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.....

"Let's say you're looking at a forest scene and you need to calculate the light coming through the trees, or you're going through a battlefield and have very dense volumetric fog that's hugging the terrain," he said. "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. Those are perfect candidates for the console to offload that to the cloud-the cloud can do the heavy lifting, because you've got the ability to throw multiple devices at the problem in the cloud."

He also said that cloud computation could even handle physics modeling, fluid dynamics, and cloth motion which require a lot of up-front computation, without adding lag to the actual gameplay. Thus the server resources Microsoft is dedicating to these calculations will be much greater than what a single, local Xbox One console can do on its own.That's where the 3:1 cloud-console description comes into play.
 

Joeboo

Molten Core Raider
8,157
140
Wouldn't all of that be massively limited by your internet connection bandwidth? I can't see your average person possibly having enough download bandwidth to stream a high-end graphical game without noticeable lag. Not until we are all on Google Fiber or something similar. Shit, I have a 50mbps internet connection and can still barely stream 480p Youtube videos during peak hours without buffering, and those aren't dynamic situations that have to be processed differently for every user like a game would be.
 

Szlia

Member
6,627
1,373
[...]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.
Considering the consoles that might need the server farm's power at any one time are only the ones currently in use, which represents a fraction of the total of consoles built, it seems to me the devs can assume they have access to a lot more than 3Xbones of power.


Do we have some coders here btw that could explain what kind of heavy lifting need to be done with lightning and fog before rendering a scene and that is no longer needed for subsequent frames? Also, couldn't these calculations take place at the devs office in order for the results to be on the disk? It's not like they'll randomize the position of trees each time they need to render the map...


Lastly, since latency prevents cloud calculation to be done for frame critical operation, is going four or five time faster on non-frame critical operations such a boon? It's nice if a level is built in 2 seconds instead of 10, but yeah...
 

Asherah

Silver Knight of the Realm
287
38
I also have a hard time thinking of that many tasks in a game that require a huge amount of computational power while not being sensitive to latency. Maybe you could offload part of the path finding in some games. Maybe the AI in your chess game. Maybe bitcoins for the developers?
 

Caliane

Avatar of War Slayer
15,230
11,376
Technically he could be right! The architecture could be a generation ahead even if it gets left in the dust in terms of performance by a current gen high end gaming PC. Obviously, if that is the case the wording is intentionally deceptive.
well... the high end gaming pc is nearly a dead market.
you have consoles on one side, and laptops/mobile on the other side.

price is driven by supply and demand of course. Gaming PC prices dropped as higher tech became the norm, and more PCs made it into peoples homes.

Its been discussed already how PC bleeding edge has slowed down ALOT. between consolization, and the lack of games being made for bleeding edge systems, there is no demand for high end. you CAN buy one, but there's nothing to play on it.
Now mobile gaming. the demand is for smaller, and less power. not more powerful. Desktop growth is going to be stagnant for some time, while we'll see faster and better tablets for some time now.
 

Big_w_powah

Trakanon Raider
1,887
750
God this thread is so long. So pretty much with the Xbox1 I can no longer rent games from Redbox, use one of my friend's games or play my 360 games?
I have kids. My kids have friends. My kids and their friends share/temp trade games ALL THE TIME. Fuck Xbox1.
 

velk

Trakanon Raider
2,628
1,205
Do we have some coders here btw that could explain what kind of heavy lifting need to be done with lightning and fog before rendering a scene and that is no longer needed for subsequent frames? Also, couldn't these calculations take place at the devs office in order for the results to be on the disk? It's not like they'll randomize the position of trees each time they need to render the map...
Basically yes - if you are going to pre-calculate you may as well bake it into the map. It has some potential advantages though, in that it doesn't require the box you are playing on - you could, for example, start to pre-calculate stuff for the next level while they play the current one. Whether that would do anything useful kind of depends on if there is any way for a player to alter the map and assets while they aren't on that level. Seems a bit like a solution looking for a problem at this stage.

As for the actual backend - MS putting up 3 xbox's worth of server hardware for each xbox sold is asinine bullshit. Servers are *more* expensive than individual units due to scalability issues, plus they are paying for the electricity and cooling and internet bandwidth for them. From a business model that makes as much sense as Sony sending out a hooker to deliver your PS4 and give you a blowjob as you plug it in.
 

Szlia

Member
6,627
1,373
Maybe the 3 Xbox worth of power is what devs can expect to be available, which statistically probably means something like one Xbox in the could for five or six units sold (guesstimation).
 

an accordion_sl

shitlord
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8
xbox-one-youtube_____4famh.jpg



Microsoft disables comments on the XB1 reveal because they didn't like people saying mean things to them.
 

Zaphid

Trakanon Raider
5,862
294
Basically yes - if you are going to pre-calculate you may as well bake it into the map. It has some potential advantages though, in that it doesn't require the box you are playing on - you could, for example, start to pre-calculate stuff for the next level while they play the current one. Whether that would do anything useful kind of depends on if there is any way for a player to alter the map and assets while they aren't on that level. Seems a bit like a solution looking for a problem at this stage.

As for the actual backend - MS putting up 3 xbox's worth of server hardware for each xbox sold is asinine bullshit. Servers are *more* expensive than individual units due to scalability issues, plus they are paying for the electricity and cooling and internet bandwidth for them. From a business model that makes as much sense as Sony sending out a hooker to deliver your PS4 and give you a blowjob as you plug it in.
I can't program my way out of a paper bag, but wouldn't you also have to account for internet connection going down, packet loss and how big amount of data to transfer are we looking at here ? Yeah, seems like a solution looking for a problem, that didn't stop EA from claiming Simcity could do it though
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