Xbox One cloud graphics rendering: SA gamers’ bane?

In a recent interview with Ars Technica, General Manager of Redmond Game Studios and Platforms, Matt Booty said that the Xbox One will use the power of the cloud to accelerate the console’s performance and enhance the gamer’s experience.

Ars asked how the promised 300,000 server-strong Xbox Live cloud architecture would get used and Booty responded that the servers would be used to do difficult calculations and run through heavy workloads and relay that information back to the One. On hearing this, Ars noted that cloud computation could be dogged by latency and server load.

Should this technology prove practical and actually seriously enhance the game experience visually and otherwise, this raises a serious concern about how Xbox One games may perform without the cloud processing backing it up.

For South African gamers, we have one more huge obstacle to consider – our notoriously expensive and often unreliable Internet connections. South African ADSL networks in particular pale in comparison to those of more well-developed nations, both in terms of upload/download speeds and service availability. ADSL will be the most desirable connection type for South African gamers looking to take advantage of Xbox One Live cloud computing services.

Xbox One console

Speaking to Ars Technica, Booty said:

“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.”

He presses on with a little more detail about what kind of things the servers would actually do;

“One example of that might be lighting. 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. 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.”

Xbox One controller

In the interview Booty also identified physics modelling, fluid dynamics and cloth animation as workloads that could be offloaded to servers. Booty noted that, ” a rule of thumb we like to use is that for every Xbox One available in your living room we’ll have three of those devices in the cloud available.” However, that leaves the question of whether the games will actually look any different when there’s not a helping hand. Fortunately, Booty had some more detail on that as well in a potential scenario.

“Without getting too into the weeds, think about a lighting technique like ambient occlusion that gives you all the cracks and crevices and shadows that happen not just from direct light. There are a number of calculations that have to be done up front, and as the camera moves the effect will change. So when you walk into a room, it might be that for the first second or two the fidelity of the lighting is done by the console, but then, as the cloud catches up with that, the data comes back down to the console and you have incredibly realistic lighting.

If there’s a fast connection and if the cloud is available and if the scene allows it, you’re obviously going to capitalize on that. In the event of a drop out—and we all know that Internet can occasionally drop out, and I do say occasionally because these days it seems we depend on Internet as much as we depend on electricity—the game is going to have to intelligently handle that.”

Its an interesting idea and it’s not one we’ve seen before. Cloud computation does have its merits, but use in graphical rendering is a bit of a stretch of the imagination, not least because the Xbox One is at least five times more powerful and more capable than the 360 in an ideal scenario.

Game developers typically tailor their games to run on the platform that’s the lowest common denominator in terms of performance. Adding cloud rendering brings an extra, arguably unnecessary layer of complexity to games that should be able to run offline with all the graphical details you’d expect the console to resolve.