I've seen a worrying number of posters here refer to the cloud as "unlimited power", or "the future of gaming" or whatever.
Unfortunately I cannot really tell who is and is not being sarcastic.
Allow me to briefly quote what I have already written on the subject in another thread:
That said, please stop talking about Cloud processing as if it means anything. It doesn't. People are starting to treat it like how Sony treated the CELL processor, hyping it up as a game changer when in reality it amounted to almost nothing as claimed. This is actually WORSE than the Cell though. The Cell at the very least was a real, physical thing that could be quantified. Cloud processing is a pipe dream that will never be used as advertised.
First of all, Cloud Processing entails a very real, literal "always online" requirement. For multiplayer-only games this really isn't a problem assuming that the game is relying on the cloud processor for almost nothing. If you try to get a cloud processor to start doing a LOT of work [i.e. quadrupling the Xbox 1's GPU output for example] you start to encounter a lot of problems.
The more crap that a game demands the cloud processor do, the faster and more reliable of an internet connection will be requried to do it. This makes actual serious cloud processing far worse than normal "always online" DRM. With DRM the server only needs to know that you're there. You can do that with a 56k connection. If you want the server to actually, you know, do stuff and to have significant amounts of information relayed back and forth between your console and their servers constantly you need something more. To get enough power to increase the Xbox 1's power up to the PS4's GPU power I'm going to guess that you need a VERY fast, and VERY reliable internet connection. As in, if your connection slows down during prime time you're screwed.
There are additional problems associated with that. Why would a game developer ever even want to use the cloud if there's going to be so few people who can even get it to work? They're going to leave themselves stranded with a very small potential target audience. MS recently stated that the Cloud could theoretically quadruple the XB1's power. Great, if there was ever a game developed that actually required that kind of juice from the cloud they'll probably be lucky if they sell 10K copies worldwide. The more you want the cloud processor to do, the worse these problems get.
There's also the issue of natural internet latency, which I guess I kind of covered already but screw it. Even very fast internet connections are too damn slow. The highest speed internet available at the consumer level still transfers data a crap ton slower than it is through a computer's motherboard. By the time a cloud processor does its work and relays the information back to your console, its too late. You're sure as hell not going to be playing anything at 60fps when using the cloud. Too many frames will have gone by the time the info reaches your console.
Of course there is always the future aspect, surely internet connections of the future will be powerful enough, and prevalent enough, for this to become practical? Well, yeah probably but its still stupid. APUs and RAM grow in power exponentially faster than internet speeds do. By the time it actually does become practical to get a cloud processor to do 40x the work of a 360, that will be such a trivial amount that no one will care. By the time that we have the internet infrastructure to get the XB1's GPU to match the PS4's GPU, GPU tech will have advanced so far that no one will give a damn. There will NEVER come a time where cloud processing is actually prefered for the use of actual processing. Simply installing better hardware will always be the better option. The only use that cloud processing will ever have is always-online DRM, and for that you really don't need the cloud to do much at all.
TL;DRCloud processing is a useless pipe dream that will never actually be useable for seriously increasing your system's power. Its only practical function will be to enforce always-online DRM.
So far I've only had one person correct me on the technicalities of this statement. Cloud processing CAN be useful for basic lighting and texture work, as the latency issues that internet connections face wouldn't be as serious of a problem. Apparently Nintendo is going to attept to use cloud processing for similar purposes.
Basic texture and lighting work is not what MS or some of the lems here are trying to hype up though. Evidently some people honestly believe MS's claims thatthe cloud can "Quadruple the power of the Xbox One" [or something to that effect]. For those of you who do believe this: Are you f***ing crazy!? For the reasons I described above, the use of a cloud processor to do actual hard computational and latency-intolerant work is completely impossible in the current consumer market.
I would like to point out to all of you that the average US internet speed in late 2012 was only 7.4mbps. You want to "quadruple the Xbox One", which apparently uses 68.3gbps from just the RAM alone, over an internet connection? What? Am I crazy or is something horribly wrong here?
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