re: Official: Microsoft planning on completely reversing DRM policies

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Reading tons of Microsoft marketing material and then defending every word, no matter how foolish it makes you look qualifies everyone to be a programmer and network engineer/architect...duh!

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Why not? If it means there are less calculations for the APU to do due to some of it being dumped off onto the cloud then wouldn't that theoretically free up the APU to handle tougher tasks including graphics and physics processing?

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Latency is going to affect how immediate the computational requests of the cloud can be. When a game needs something processed, it sends a request to a server and waits for the reply. Even assuming instantaneous processing thanks to the power of the servers, the internet is incredibly slow in terms of real-time computing. A request from your console has to find its way through numerous routers and servers until it reaches its destination, and the results have the same labyrinthine journey back. To put this in perspective, when the logic circuits of a CPU want some data, they have to wait a few nanoseconds (billionths of a second) to retrieve it from its cache. If not in cache, the CPU has to wait as much as a few hundred nanoseconds to fetch the data from main RAM - and this is considered bad news for processor efficiency. If the CPU were to ask the cloud to calculate something, the answer won't be available for potentially 100ms or more, depending on internet latency - some 100,000 nanoseconds!

As a game has only 33 milliseconds to render a frame at 30FPS, such long delays mean the cloud cannot be relied upon for real-time, immediate results per frame. If you crash your Forza car into a wall, you don't want to see your vehicle continuing through to the other side of the scenery for the next three or four frames (even longer on those inevitable internet hiccups) until the physics running on the cloud return with the information that you've crashed.

The latency issue is something Microsoft recognises, with Matt Booty saying, "Things that I would call latency-sensitive would be reactions to animations in a shooter, reactions to hits and shots in a racing game, reactions to collisions. Those things you need to have happen immediately and on frame and in sync with your controller. There are some things in a video game world, though, that don't necessarily need to be updated every frame or don't change that much in reaction to what's going on."

With latency an issue, the scope for cloud computation is limited to a subset of game tasks. Okay, we can work with that, but we still have the last great consideration - bandwidth.

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The PS4 memory system allocates around 20,000MB/s for the CPU of its total 176,000MB/s. The cloud can provide one twenty-thousandth of the data to the CPU that the PS4's system memory can. You may have an internet connection that's much better than 8mbps of course, but even superfast fibre-optic broadband at 50mbps equates to an anaemic 6MB/s. This represents a significant bottleneck to what can be processed on the cloud, and that's before upload speed is even considered. Upload speed is a small fraction of download speed, and this will greatly reduce how much information a job can send to the cloud to process. Taking the Forza crash example, if the console has to upload both the car collision mesh and scenery mesh to the cloud for it to calculate whether they have collided or not, that's going to take several seconds.

Of course, we wouldn't send data over the internet without compressing it first. It's through compression that OnLive manages to stream high-definition game video over those same slow internet connections. If OnLive can do it with games, why can't it be done with game data for cloud computing? The main issue here is that video can be compressed with lossy algorithms that throw away large amounts of data that the viewer is insensitive to, producing a video that looks largely like the uncompressed source while needing a fraction of the data. This isn't possible with game data like AI or physics states or models.

What this means is that cloud computing cannot be used for real-time jobs, something Microsoft has admitted.

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For cross-platform titles running on PS4 and PC, there's the question of the economic sense in developing Xbox One specific cloud-based augmentations rather than using the same cross-platform algorithms toned down for the Xbox's less powerful GPU. This places Microsoft in a conundrum - if the cloud is unavailable to its rivals, it is unlikely to be used in third-party games and the Xbox One is unlikely to benefit outside of a few exclusives.

If Microsoft does extend its cloud service to other platforms, it loses the computing advantage claimed for Xbox One. What's obvious at this point is that the concept of cloud computing looks uncertain and unlikely, and Microsoft needs to prove its claims with actual software.

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The main issue here is that video can be compressed with lossy algorithms that throw away large amounts of data that the viewer is insensitive to, producing a video that looks largely like the uncompressed source while needing a fraction of the data. This isn't possible with game data like AI or physics states or models.

What this means is that cloud computing cannot be used for real-time jobs, something Microsoft has admitted.

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