Jonathan Blow: Microsoft's Cloud/Server Claims Are Lies

[loa]

And even if that ominous "cloud" thing no one knows what exactly it is does magically enhance the processing power, it would still be eating a shitton of bandwidth you need to be constantly online for.
Microsoft jerking off over the "connected experience" the "power of the cloud" gives you only shows how far removed from reality they are.
Nobody wants this. It's like the nuads thing all over again.

 

[Zipa]

What I want to know is how exactly would cloud computing help? If I'm correct, it would mean that some of the calculations would be done server-side, right? OK, I can see the idea behind this, but doesn't this mean that you would need a constant, stable, high speed connection to play any game that used that feature?

Also, can anyone point me to a successful example of cloud computing? The first two that come to mind are SimCity (lol!) and OnLive (lol?), and that doesn't really instill confidence. But even if this is the best cloud computing incarnation in gaming ever, it would still mean the console would need a constant internet connection to play games.

So, the console doesn't have to be constantly online, only needs to check in once every 24 hours, but fuck you if you want to play something?

Basically yeah its like onlive where some (or all in onlives case) of the graphics processing is offloaded to a server to do the work instead of the machine you are using to play the game. Rightly as you say it falls down because it requires a very good (aka fiber optic cable) connection.
It just wouldn't work well or all all with a lot of peoples internet connections. I think the stats say that about 5% of the USA has this sort of connection. Same for the UK, we have only just started getting it here.

 

[DrunkOnEstus]

The whole thing is Microsoft scrambling after seeing the PS4 specs, that it uses faster RAM and does more computations at a faster speed and shit. Pulling "the cloud" as a trump card usually "tricks" people who aren't in the know because it's a marketing buzzword that many layman folk don't really understand.

Even if 300,000 physical servers were adding to the graphical power, you wouldn't want that. You would need an internet connection constantly or your game would look worse than it could, you would see compression artifacts, with some textures and shit looking like a sub-HD Youtube video, and if your Internet was capped you would eat up data rather quickly.

It just looks worse and worse for Microsoft, but what I wonder is if ordinary people who don't visit gaming websites and do their research are aware of what lurks beneath this machine. I foresee many angry people who don't understand why their game has to install, why it asks for a fee to be paid when they bring a game to their buddy's house, why it won't work without the Kinect even though they don't have the space for it/don't care for it. Even with people like us, unfortunately I can imagine this still being successful. We "rallied" against always-on DRM, season passes, microtransactions, on-disc and day-one DLC before, and now we just accept that shit as being a normal part of the industry that we'll take but wish it wasn't there. It's no wonder Microsoft has the gall to believe they can push it even farther than all that.

 

[ph0b0s123]

So the Xbox is to use 'Xbox' servers, otherwise known as just servers on the internet to help out with their processing.

So to cut the mustard the next gen console from Microsoft will need PC's on the internet to help them out. OK just checking...

 

[Colt47]

He's probably right that it wont do much to improve graphics or processing speed on demanding games. The PCIe slot on a motherboard usually used to host a graphics card can funnel 8gb/s through a shared parallel bus architecture. On the other hand, our internet connection is typically much lower than that as just about anyone who has done a download can attest: The average US broadband speed is currently 6.6 mb/s. So, it comes down to the question of just how in the world does Microsoft plan to improve graphics fidelity using the cloud with less than 1/1000th the bandwidth of a graphics port?

They might be able to stream input information back to a server that is running a game and then stream a feed of what is happening in the game back to the player, but there would be a lot of lag problems trying to do it that way. Likewise, a system like that would really start going the way of "pay $60 for a service", as we wouldn't even have a physical disc on our end anymore.

 

[Vivi22]

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.

Honestly, it's not hard to stop and think for two seconds and realize that at the very least, their talk of using cloud computing to triple or quadruple the power of the console is utter bullshit. Even if they dedicate the hardware on the server side to technically equate to four Xbone's total, you're still limited by internet connection speed. You can't just offload information from the Xbone to the servers the way the hardware inside your machine talks to each other because the bandwidth on an internet connection is a tiny fraction of the speeds the hardware in the box uses. You'd never be able to transmit data back and forth between your box and the cloud to see any measurable performance improvement.

So the only way it would actually amount to anything is if much of the game is run on the servers themselves and streamed to you, which I doubt will ever happen except in the occasional online only game because you're basically talking about requiring an always online connection and treading into Diablo 3/Sim City territory. I'm not sure how many sane developers are still willing to go there, let alone try and code a game that runs partly on servers and partly on the gamers machine. It would be a programming/networking nightmare frankly and I don't know of any game that really attempts to offload most of the graphics or other processing jobs to servers.

Point is, yes, Microsoft outright lied when they said they could quadruple the power of the Xbone using the cloud. I know less about the prospect of them running 300k servers with many of them being virtual, so I'd leave that to other people to debunk, but given their penchant for distorting the truth and making stupid decisions lately, I wouldn't put it past them to be lying about that too.

 

[ColaWarVeteran]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

Can't speak for everyone else but personally I'm not a big fan of his. He has a tendency to talk like he's a big name in the industry despite only having one game (that I feel was okay at best) to his credit. As for the topic at hand I can't help but feel this is all just so he can pull an "I told you so" when/if someone with the actual technical knowledge comes out and proves it's true.

 

[dumbseizure]

God dammit Blow.

Generally when you go to call bullshit on something, it is quite often favorable to have the know-how to ACTUALLY prove it is bullshit, otherwise you may as well just be a looney in the street raving about the sky falling.

 

[VoidWanderer]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

If I recall correctly we dislike him because he's a bit of a pretentious wanker.

True, but I actually think the pretentious wanker actually has a point in regards to cloud servers increasing hte power of the Console. If anything, since it will only affect consoles that are able to use the cloud servers, their 'boost' will not affect them , weakening MS's claims.

Also, I figure it would be slightly MORE draining having to keep checking the cloud server is working and saving/loading from there. I am probably wrong on this, but this is my interpretation of events.

 

[Raioken18]

I feel like this is probably true though. Anyone remember when EA claimed that a lot of the processing calculations for Sim City occured server side, then when someone did hijack the code to create an offline mode it was relatively simple and proved that it wasn't the case.

I mean you could do server side image processing, but... if it's meant to provide "Improved" graphical processing (which I assume is in comparison to it's competitors), then I'd have to be a bit suspicious.

 

[Something Amyss]

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.

Blow is a known blowhard who likes to talk without any real substance. No, not talk. Rant. Essentially, he's a gamer who rants about stuff with no real basis who gets credibility because he made Braid.

I'd like to have the capability to put out a hit indie game. Then, any stupid thing I said would be news. I'd screw with gaming media SO HARD.

...Which, I suspect, is what Blow is doing.

 

[Yopaz]

Don't we hate this guy for some reason? Should we listen to him?

Actually no, people don't have a reason to hate him. I haven't seen any reason that is more valid than my subjective 'dislike' of game development houses that don't cater to my platform of choise or people that I don't understand.

There, I said it. People hate him because they don't understand him. Not that I try to defend his words, in many cases he has a vastly different view on the whole gaming genre than most people do but fuck, more often than not people clearly don't get what he is saying.

It's because he's made one mediocre game and acts like he's the savior of the game industry and the only one presenting original concepts. Coming from someone with only a 2D platformer under his belt I'm not sure I would say he's offered anything new.

I don't think he's wrong in this though. Sure, cloud gaming got potential to assist hardware, I tested out some free trials from that company that went bankrupt that provided cloud gaming... It was OK.
However as someone has already stated, what does this mean for the games? If we can improve performance will we also require it? If that's the case then Microsoft pretty much is using always on DRM, but it will also drain a whole lot of bandwidth just to screw with people who's got capped bandwidth.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

It's funny how people seem to hate Jonathan Bow for saying this. He's saying the exact same thing as the rest of the internet. But he's not anonymous. He has a face so he can be hated. Fuck that, I agree with him.

 

[Kargathia]

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

If Microsoft was running this with 300K physical servers doing lighting and physics, it will still be bogged down by the time any popular game utilizing was released for the Xbone. Let alone latency. I agree with Blow in the sense that this is mostly a marketing department rolling their heads around on a keyboard.

The claim is rubbish even with the most basic knowledge of computer architecture. Most lighting and even physics now is done on shaders on the GPU. Are we just going to do it in software on server or shared GPU(s), with internet latency and doing it on most likely conventional x86 hardware? This claim is fucking retarded, its quicker to just do a second rendering pass than it is to send all the information over the internet let alone the scheduling overhead then to do the bloody computation.

Why aren't people discussing the actual hardware advantages of the Xbone? Because the marketers want you to know about the retarded shit they came up with rather than what the engineers put thought and effort into.

Oh, Microsoft's claims are pretty much definitely bullshit, but Blow isn't saying anything beyond what anyone with even the remotest knowledge of how computing works could tell you.

Which in effect is him trying to debunk unproven bullshit with more unproven bullshit - he even admits himself he doesn't have the technical know-how to explain why they're talking out of their asses. It's like fighting fire with fire, except that for this you're going to need a shovel.

It's funny how people seem to hate Jonathan Bow for saying this. He's saying the exact same thing as the rest of the internet. But he's not anonymous. He has a face so he can be hated. Fuck that, I agree with him.

Oh, it's not that he's wrong, it's just that he's saying exactly the same as the rest of the internet, and is a big waste of the extra attention heaped upon him.

 

[Strazdas]

Well, noone claimed Cloud gaming will improve graphics to begin with.
Physics, AI, Offsite calculation - sure. Graphics - not possible. You can imrpove graphics offsite if tyou stream them, but thats not clouding.

So, essentially we have somebody calling out MS on being rather economical with the truth in a PR reveal, but doesn't have any evidence, or even tech knowledge to back it up.

It's like a dick measuring contest, but then with bullshit.

His last name is "Blow". Acting like a dick is predetermined.

Seriously; cloud computing will never enhance game play, it will only slow it down. Don't believe, how laggy do things get when you're on a 20 man raid in WoW? How much does your fps drop?

Nopt sure about WOW and thier programming sincei dont play one, but in other games i often run with a pack of 30 to 200 people and experience no lag-jumps or what is popularly called "rubberbanding".
FPS drops are solely based on your computer calculation - your computer cant manage to calculate that much. if anything Cloud gaming would help with exactly that - FPS drops. your attacking it from a wrong angle mate.

 

[rob_simple]

I still have no idea what a Cloud is, although I confess I find it to be a pleasant image, but from reading some of the more knowledgeable posts on this thread, all I can picture now is that gaming on the new consoles is going to be like watching a video on Youtube when the servers are overloaded.

Am I going to end up sitting watching that fucking circle of dots chase itself while the rest of my level buffers?