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"The Power of the Cloud" - what happened?

Most people are skeptical that is can provide 20X the power of the xbone not that it does not exist.

bingo..its not the "cloud doesnt exist" its the 20x the power on the xbox one thing that some people here want to use as a weapon on their funny console wars


nope


if only that was what people in this thread were actually arguing about, though.

In reply to
In the early day MS emphasized the cloud as something that could improve the gaming experience.

People said:
It was never actually meant to be a big deal. Marketing futurespeak.

Spin.

The cloud exists, but not for those reasons or uses.

They finally realized they weren't fooling anyone so they stopped bothering.

It was marketing bullshit, I mean every game this generation is benefiting from cloud servers.

It was complete and utter BS from the get-go.

It was all bullshit, thats what.

i think it was always a bit more 'fog' than 'cloud'. or maybe just 'pollution' :) ...

reality happened

It was marketing word salad that didn't survive contact with reality.

it's almost like it was always bullshit

The cloud is great for offloading workload but not in things that need instant calculations like games.

It's there but not in the way Microsoft made you think it would be. I'm fairly certain a lot of their voice stuff is cloud based.

I think they realized that everyone saw through it as marketing bullshit and nothing more.

They just notice almost everyone aren't stupid enough to get their bullshit, glad they stopped with it though, it was ridiculous.

Smoke and mirrors.

MS learned slowly that people weren't as stupid as they thought and that it was a completely silly bullet point.

Reality happened.

Don't believe something a marketing guy tells you

The marketing nonsense blew up in their faces while consumers pointed and gave it a good bollocking. We know what dedicated servers are, and all the doublespeak in the world from Harrison, Penello and company was nothing compared to the facts.

None of these mentioned "infinite power of the cloud" "10x" "20x" etc. These people flatout denied that it would have any effect. They're wrong. That's why this thread was bumped. You guys are moving goal posts arguing about this 20x shit.
 
Most people are skeptical that is can provide 20X the power of the xbone not that it does not exist.

Exactly. At least with me. PR buzz, nothing more with the 20 times quote. It will be misused in arguments by those who are lesser tech adept.
 
Most people are skeptical that is can provide 20X the power of the xbone not that it does not exist.
Do we really care how much compute is being provided here? I don't think that's the issue here.

This is a milestone in gaming, many will follow in my opinion.

Edit: Post at the top of the page pretty much outlines it.
 
He makes assumptions and genralizations we don't know. And the videos of extremly small scale physics demonstrations are interesting but irrelevant. Are they more complicated than just collapsing mesh? Obviously. But put that demonstration in a game world with live players and on a xbox or ps4. You can't. And that's our point coming back here, that it isn't just pr bs.

you are making these same assumptions and el torro has demostrated again and again he knows his stuff,i dont know who u are and i have only read a lot of nonsense on you post,no you dont have proof or anything,but keep triying,its free anyway


rembrandt talking about moving goalpost..yeah xD
 
Exactly. At least with me. PR buzz, nothing more with the 20 times quote. It will be misused in arguments by those who are lesser tech adept.

I think actual gameplay (albeit pre-alpha) qualifies as just a little bit more than casual PR buzz. It's proof that the once proof-of-concept can actually become a tangible product.

But now you're saying it's not tangible enough, and that we must wait until the retail product in order to judge whether or not it's for real.
 
I think actual gameplay (albeit pre-alpha) qualifies as just a little bit more than casual PR buzz. It's proof that the once proof-of-concept can actually become a tangible product.

But now you're saying it's not tangible enough, and that we must wait until the retail product in order to judge whether or not it's for real.

I dont think that footage proved that CC can provide 20X the power of the Xbone.
 
Of all the things to be skeptical of, why choose the 20x number though? A VM with 20x the CPU power of an XB1 is very possible.

It is not the number, it is the context.

Of course a farm of servers to do all that cool server shit can and will be 20 times that of an XBox One. It is already outdated tech... it is how it will be used by those who do not understand this tech.

The PR machine acting like it is an exclusive thing to the XBox, throwing out that number in context, or making those think their system is secret sauce of 20 times more powerful is where it will get nauseating to read through.

I dont think that footage proved that CC can provide 20X the power of the Xbone.

I sure hope not, lol.
The 7 Jaguar cores available for games in the console produce a peak performance of 96 GFLOPS (7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS per cycle), assuming for the sake of simplicity that the entire 7th core is allocated to the game. That times 20 would amount to almost 2 TFLOPS of CPU performance. You cannot get that from a single VM.

And that is why it is all PR bullet-points out of context, that will not stop as people continue to lap it up.

But 20 times sure does sound good, blast processing good.
 
Of all the things to be skeptical of, why choose the 20x number though? A VM with 20x the CPU power of an XB1 is very possible.

The 7 Jaguar cores available for games in the console produce a peak performance of 96 GFLOPS (7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS per cycle), assuming for the sake of simplicity that the entire 7th core is allocated to the game. That times 20 would amount to almost 2 TFLOPS of CPU performance. You cannot get that from a single VM.
 
Most people are skeptical that is can provide 20X the power of the xbone not that it does not exist.

Why are they sceptical? the whole point is that you can have as much CPU as you want server side, making calculations for a machine somewhere else.

Microsoft already stated that 3x the computational power per user is allocated on Azure.

in a 4 player co-op game you have 12x the power of a single machine acting as a dedicated server. There are video's that show as many as 8 players in a game, so it doesn't seem like such a stretch to say that a single game has 20x a single Xbox CPU allocated to a single game.
 
2600426-7212286479-25059.jpg



I tease
 
The 7 Jaguar cores available for games in the console produce a peak performance of 96 GFLOPS (7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS per cycle), assuming for the sake of simplicity that the entire 7th core is allocated to the game. That times 20 would amount to almost 2 TFLOPS of CPU performance. You cannot get that from a single VM.

Quote for the truth.
 
I agree, when it is warranted, this is still pre-alpha footage proving nothing of the sorts of any "victory" they were going for . Jumping the gun without any bullets still.



Or you can read again what I said, go back to the other thread where they were deciding who was gonna bump this, then the same handful of people were ready and waiting to jump on people with words like, "salt", and "goal posts" and " you have nothing but, reasons."

I do not see any of those same handful of people looking for a healthy discourse, since not one of them quoted ElTorro or Drek with their rebuttal or "reasons". Just wanting to "quote and toss the salt".

Reply to Drek who wants real world simulation of destructible environments down to microscopic details ... in a video game; which is bullshit because you'd need server farms to render that kind of minutiae.

OR

Reply to ElTorro who wants to know what the exact computational cost of the destruction and whether or not they are truly legitimate, complex destruction physics, answers that we do not yet currently have.

Yeah, how about no. My only purpose here was to post that there is being progress made with cloud computing with video games as the OP questioned and to call to attention the extreme replies to the negative that the OP's inquiry got. Time will tell just how advanced the cloud computation in CD3 is, but we've seen progress today and that's all that matters.

If you want to get hung up on "20x the computational power of an XB1" or butthurt over a Wall of Shame which happens OFTEN on NeoGAF, that's on you.
 
The denial and moving goalposst in this thread, lol.

It's a good thing to be wrong once in a while when it improves gaming as a whole. Just take the L and move on.
 
you are making these same assumptions and el torro has demostrated again and again he knows his stuff,i dont know who u are and i have only read a lot of nonsense on you post,no you dont have proof or anything,but keep triying,its free anyway


rembrandt talking about moving goalpost..yeah xD

Are you cboat's alt?
 
rembrandt talking about moving goalpost..yeah xD

did you even read my post and the quotes? let's not pretend this thread was originally about determining if the infinite power of the cloud was really 5x or 20x. It was if it existed point blank and several posters said it didn't. They were wrong.
 
Even that last gif isn't fully representative. The wrecking crew mode was just insane and that destruction on offer there does come pretty close to rivalling that we've seen in CD, but again, we're comparing a finished game to one that's still a year+ away from release and will undoubtedly improve significantly in that span of time.

It doesn't seem like real physics though. Notice in the last gif how the whole building crumbles but there is practically no debris on the ground. In a real world the debris of a building that size would be three times the height of the character at least.

It was good tech for the time though, but I don't think we can compare it to what we've seen from Crackdown today.
 
Have we seen anyone try high destructibility environments after Volition's third attempt to do so with the Red Faction series tanked just like the previous two?

I think this level of destruction with that graphical fidelity would be possible on the PS4, Xbox One, and any decent gaming rig if a developer wanted to make it happen. It's fucking lego block construction. There isn't any material deformation (other than basic shearing), phase changes, etc. evident in any of these gifs. This is an iterative step up over what Volition was knocking out of the park early last gen, Inflating the scope doesn't impress me.

Show me a game where the rockets being shot into the building actually chips away at the concrete, creating cracks, and the building then falls based on those damage patterns. Or one where the glass actually melts when explosions go off near it. Or liquids vaporizing into steam.

Also, maybe they should have actually seen how buildings go down or even how they're built. Buildings don't fall like that when explosives go off or when they're struck with a wrecking ball. They crumple and cave in, not topple over like a Jenga tower. Also, large concrete structures have rebar all through them, netting the concrete together, resulting in entirely different breakage patterns from what Crackdown exhibits.

I mean, if you're going to trumpet early 2000's tech as cutting edge proof of DA CLOUD POWA at least get a few structural engineers to make it look right.

Hmmm I see what you mean, going to be fun to watch as this game rolls out.
 
The bump was necessary. A lot of people flat out denied the cloud would have any benefit at all in the all too typical "let's not trust a word from MS" fashion that IMO infects every thread like this, and I feel like they need to be outed when proven wrong.
 
I find it kind of funny how people can barely see a difference between RFG and C3 destruction, but 1080p v. 900p is immediately apparent.

The cloud destruction looks good, they have a year to make it even better.
 
It doesn't seem like real physics though. Notice in the last gif how the whole building crumbles but there is practically no debris on the ground. In a real world the debris of a building that size would be three times the height of the character at least.

It was good tech for the time though, but I don't think we can compare it to what we've seen from Crackdown today.

From a purely destruction point of view, they will be compared and we should try to showcase the best of what RFG offered in that department.

When you get into physics and the like, it's really no contest. CD blows away RFG handily, but that's to be expected and it would be rather disappointing if it didn't.
 
The 7 Jaguar cores available for games in the console produce a peak performance of 96 GFLOPS (7 x 1.75 x 8 FLOPS per cycle), assuming for the sake of simplicity that the entire 7th core is allocated to the game. That times 20 would amount to almost 2 TFLOPS of CPU performance. You cannot get that from a single VM.

To be fair I don't know how the numbers match up exactly given it's difficult to measure performance in a VM environment, but let's just say they measured the time it takes for the XB1 to complete x number of physics computations, and found that in the VM instance it's done 20x faster. Regardless of whatever FLOP performance differential exists between the XB1 and the VM, I wouldn't say they're "wrong" for claiming a 20x difference.

I'm not saying that it's not PR (obviously it is) but it just seems silly to cling onto "X" number as proof that it's BS.
 
I find it kind of funny how people can barely see a difference between RFG and C3 destruction, but 1080p v. 900p is immediately apparent.

The cloud destruction looks good, they have a year to make it even better.

It would be funny if it wasn't so annoying and indicative of attitudes shitting up my enjoyment of gaming and talking about gaming every day of this damn gen.

/breathe
 
In the early day MS emphasized the cloud as something that could improve the gaming experience. It seems like this has yet to manifest itself.

Has MS given up on this approach or is it being used but not being talked about?

Didn't they just show it in Crackdown 3?
 
The bump was necessary. A lot of people flat out denied the cloud would have any benefit at all in the all too typical "let's not trust a word from MS" fashion that IMO infects every thread like this, and I feel like they need to be outed when proven wrong.

I never understood why people did that.
I remember even back then some people said that this can very well work for calculations which aren't latency critical and stuff like weather and destruction was mentioned, generally physics stuff. What doesn't work is latency critical stuff like actual poligons, shaders etc. So overall it could bring us games that visually don't look like anything special, but have a lot of crazy physics going on. And Crackdown looks exactly like that.

I never heard an compelling argument why this wouldn't work for stuff like that.
 
I don't understand why people are arguing about this. Is it just salty salt salt?

The guy that bumped this thread must have been making this face
OOhxxt2.png
for months waiting for even the faintest evidence to bump this thread lol
 
People have been trying to discredit the cloud ever since the Xbox One announcement.

First it was the outright denial of any positive impact for gaming.
Then Microsoft announced that all multiplayer games would run on dedicated servers on Xbox One.

Now we have Halo 5 using cloud servers for all coop campaign sessions to allow for more AI and a smoother experience.
A year ago Microsoft released a demo of cloud enabled destruction, today we saw pre-alpha footage of Crackdown using that exact same technology.

"Cloud" is a very broad term in the tech industry and all the benefits aren't hugely impactful to gameplay, but the overall experience.
Cloud saves allow continued play across consoles, and even platforms with Xbox 360 backwards compatibility.
Cloud storage allows Xbox recorded clips to be viewed on any device.
Cloud servers allows cross platform party chat between Win 10 and Xbone.

All those small benefits and larger gameplay impacting benefits are the 'power of the cloud' that people love to hate for some reason.
 
Have we seen anyone try high destructibility environments after Volition's third attempt to do so with the Red Faction series tanked just like the previous two?

I think this level of destruction with that graphical fidelity would be possible on the PS4, Xbox One, and any decent gaming rig if a developer wanted to make it happen. It's fucking lego block construction. There isn't any material deformation (other than basic shearing), phase changes, etc. evident in any of these gifs. This is an iterative step up over what Volition was knocking out of the park early last gen, Inflating the scope doesn't impress me.

Show me a game where the rockets being shot into the building actually chips away at the concrete, creating cracks, and the building then falls based on those damage patterns. Or one where the glass actually melts when explosions go off near it. Or liquids vaporizing into steam.

Also, maybe they should have actually seen how buildings go down or even how they're built. Buildings don't fall like that when explosives go off or when they're struck with a wrecking ball. They crumple and cave in, not topple over like a Jenga tower. Also, large concrete structures have rebar all through them, netting the concrete together, resulting in entirely different breakage patterns from what Crackdown exhibits.

Im skeptical as well. I think a part of Crackdown's stuff is rigged to a certain degree, even if it is for the sake of gameplay. But I applaud any development that is 'new', so Im curious about the end result.
 
All those small benefits and larger gameplay impacting benefits are the 'power of the cloud' that people love to hate for some reason.

Not hard to understand Microsoft promised the moon with the cloud and people were skeptical of that. Though I like that them getting into low orbit is now seen as the ultimate victory based on this thread.
 
nope



if only that was what people in this thread were actually arguing about, though.

In reply to


People said:




































None of these mentioned "infinite power of the cloud" "10x" "20x" etc. These people flatout denied that it would have any effect. They're wrong. That's why this thread was bumped. You guys are moving goal posts arguing about this 20x shit.

Holy shit.

They must be eating first class crow right about now.

Unless they find a way to move the goalposts. Yeah they'll do that no doubt. Now their laser focus on the x20 times comment will be used to somehow downplay the mass destruction.

Or someone will say, hey Red Faction had this before...

Whilst it remains to be seen just how this will work in real time, I do think today's face, even in its trailer stage, is a big slap in the face for the haters who jumped on this bandwagon because of a pre-existing agenda.

My concern now is that this destruction in Crackdown will be limited to MP mode only. I wish the devs had the balls to make the title online only if they had to because IF the single player doesn't have this, it'll br a big shame.
 
Why are they sceptical? the whole point is that you can have as much CPU as you want server side, making calculations for a machine somewhere else.

Microsoft already stated that 3x the computational power per user is allocated on Azure.

in a 4 player co-op game you have 12x the power of a single machine acting as a dedicated server. There are video's that show as many as 8 players in a game, so it doesn't seem like such a stretch to say that a single game has 20x a single Xbox CPU allocated to a single game.

Yeah, I think this post cracks it, as far as MS Azure scales in a "per game" basis.

On a slightly related note, Microsoft ran some adverts/trailers using Titanfall as an example. I remember seeing them on TV, but they were adverts for Azure, not Xbox One. Just wondering if they had any substance in them. Are there MS developer blogs that go into more detail I wonder?
 
Holy shit.

They must be eating first class crow right about now.

Unless they find a way to move the goalposts. Yeah they'll do that no doubt. Now their laser focus on the x20 times comment will be used to somehow downplay the mass destruction.

Or someone will say, hey Red Faction had this before...

Whilst it remains to be seen just how this will work in real time, I do think today's face, even in its trailer stage, is a big slap in the face for the haters who jumped on this bandwagon because of a pre-existing agenda.

My concern now is that this destruction in Crackdown will be limited to MP mode only. I wish the devs had the balls to make the title online only if they had to because IF the single player doesn't have this, it'll br a big shame.

Both have already happened, lol.

but somebody in the crackdown gameplay thread said they talked to the devs that said there will be limited destruction in single player. I know lots of people were worried that the game would be online only so at least there was a compromise, even though there's a possibility they could have done more if it was online only.

I hope we can at least make a private multiplayer game and mess around in that by ourselves.
 
Of all the things to be skeptical of, why choose the 20x number though? A VM with 20x the CPU power of an XB1 is very possible.
The latest Crackdown 3 trailer says:

By connecting to the Microsoft Cloud, play with twenty times the computational power of your Xbox One.
It doesn't even discriminate CPU power. That's 28 Teraflops.
 
It was always spin, and transpired to be little more than what most of us predicted it would be, solid back end to boost the networking side, Eg dedicated servers and the like. Not this boost to local graphics rendering that would magically improve the Xbox One's performance 2-3 times over like Microsoft was selling. Obviously cloud compute has potential and real benefits (see Crackdown, Forza etc), but no where near the degree Microsoft were originally boasting. Not whilst remaining financially sensible or developmentally feasible anyway.

I honestly think it was mostly just misleading damage control to reduce the performance difference narrative that was becoming ever more obvious between the PS4 and Xbox One, and to give additional merit to their cloud investments and infrastructure. Hell, we even had people like Pennello come in here on GAF out spout nonsense too.
 
nope



if only that was what people in this thread were actually arguing about, though.

In reply to


People said:




































None of these mentioned "infinite power of the cloud" "10x" "20x" etc. These people flatout denied that it would have any effect. They're wrong. That's why this thread was bumped. You guys are moving goal posts arguing about this 20x shit.

But I said all games this gen were going to benefit from the cloud. I never said it wouldn't have an effect.
 
Exactly. At least with me. PR buzz, nothing more with the 20 times quote. It will be misused in arguments by those who are lesser tech adept.

I think the 3 posts below you got it right.

Do we really care how much compute is being provided here? I don't think that's the issue here.

This is a milestone in gaming, many will follow in my opinion.

Edit: Post at the top of the page pretty much outlines it.

Of all the things to be skeptical of, why choose the 20x number though? A VM with 20x the CPU power of an XB1 is very possible.

Exactly right.


I work with some cloud technology so I'll throw my own 2 cents out there. The question is ultimately a fundamental one.

Can a computer provide additional computational power to another over a network connection?

The immediate answer to this is yes. This is like asking if one computer chip can assist another on the same motherboard with a math problem, over the network that is the system bus. Yes, just ask the Sega Saturn. (I think...)

Whether or not the data is timely enough to be useful in certain applications is another thing altogether. So making this possible was only about solving the environmental issues such as bandwidth, latency and perhaps making some changes to how online games actually work.

If anything, I would be skeptical of what was shown as indicative of real world gameplay. After all, its not a matter of whether or not this is possible, its a matter of whether or not real world conditions will support it. So I consider it risky to show something that impressive. However, when you are doing something for the first time, I guess it might naturally seem risky to others. I guess we are going to find out how it turns out, good to be a gamer in that respect. If it fails, at least they tried. However, the real takeaway in my opinion is that network connections and compute power on the server side are bound to improve over time. As they do, this type of scenario will only get better as well.
 
Too early for a crow bump, IMO. I'm pretty sure it'll pan out, but y'all should've waited for launch.

The people who just read the title and hopped in like it's still 2013 are pretty hilarious, tho.
 
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