[HN Gopher] Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with ...
___________________________________________________________________
Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with upsides for
devs
Author : jamesdco
Score : 70 points
Date : 2022-03-07 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.gamedeveloper.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.gamedeveloper.com)
| dividuum wrote:
| I wonder how they implement fast loading times. Flight simulator
| is embarrassingly slow to load and takes 2-3 minutes on my
| reasonable fast machine. I guess they have fully loaded game
| instances on standby and then sign you in once you connect using
| the mentioned new cloud gaming API?
| Animats wrote:
| That's an interesting issue for the "metaverse". Once we get
| past the NFT clown car era, and big-world systems with user
| created content at high resolution come out, metaverse systems
| will have to face the bandwidth problem Second Life faces.
| Delivering assets to the user needs more bandwidth than
| delivering video. Even 4K video. Second Life delivers content
| on the fly, and you get to watch stuff appear as content comes
| in. With enough bandwidth and a gamer PC, it's not bad, but
| many users are on slow links with weak clients, and suffer
| badly.
|
| If the work is being done "in the cloud", there can be much
| more bandwidth to the asset servers. At least 10GB between game
| machine and asset store, all within the data center. Flight
| Simulator needs that, because, like Google Earth, they have a
| whole planet of assets. A Ready Player One quality metaverse
| will have the same problem. Or, for example, the Matrix demo
| for Unreal Engine 5, where you download 16 square kilometers of
| highly detailed city.
|
| There are performance downsides of cloud gaming. Too much lag,
| mostly. Speed of light alone is too much slowdown to allow
| remote VR rendering. At 120 FPS, a few hundred miles of
| transmission delay alone costs a frame time. Network delay
| makes it worse. You can't buffer the video ahead, like you can
| for pre-stored video. The pew-pew crowd gets unhappy above
| 40ms, although there are tricks for FPS games to make targeting
| work across laggy links.
| sandos wrote:
| Pre-loaded machines work, but I imagine you would have to move
| away from that once you support enough games, but it should be
| "easy" to just resume a machine to different games start states
| from disk. Afaik games are mostly using lots of CPU when
| starting so youre basically pre-computing all that and using
| the disk as a look-up table.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > I wonder how they implement fast loading times
|
| Proper DX12 is still on the roadmap.
|
| They will do it like this:
|
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi...
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I'm still confused by the existence of APIs like this. Why
| would a video game suddenly need a proprietary way to access
| a storage device? Have hard drives & filesystems gotten that
| much slower over the past 20 years?
| mkr-hn wrote:
| Games already use virtual file systems for storing assets
| to reduce load times. Otherwise they have to load a bunch
| of tiny files with filesystem and OS overhead for each. I'm
| sure some would appreciate not having to invent their own.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| In that case aren't you talking about read-only asset
| packs? Those have been around for years and aren't very
| complex to implement. Big studios already have their own
| implementations. There are plenty of "free as in beer"
| implementations out there to use.
| mkr-hn wrote:
| This is true of every aspect of game development DirectX
| implements an API for, but it's still popular. I don't
| know enough to know why, but there's probably a good
| reason for that.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > Big studios already have their own implementations.
|
| Hence the API.
| kevingadd wrote:
| It skips a couple layers of abstraction to enable faster
| load times, the goal here is to improve over the state of
| the art - the promise of 'no load times' sometimes
| delivered by the PS5 and Xbox Series X via this same
| approach
|
| Some PC ports are already getting close to this as well -
| elden ring's load times are very short on my PC.
|
| It's also hard to overstate how much of an improvement it
| is to have an NVMe drive send data directly to the GPU
| instead of have to send it via the CPU. The amount of
| pointless work involved in the CPU hop is pretty
| significant.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I guess the thing that really makes NVMe -> GPU really
| practical is the presence of arbitrary shader code. Even
| if your assets are some general or optimized format, you
| can run an arbitrary shader that copies from one buffer
| to another in order to get stuff in the right format.
| paulmd wrote:
| actually it's rather the opposite, the focus is on fixed-
| function decoder blocks that are present in the new
| consoles.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| If I understand that announcement correctly, most of the
| performance benefit comes from cutting down the number of
| kernel-to-userspace transitions, similar to userspace
| networking on Linux.
|
| Another possibility is that DirectStorage requires use of
| raw NVMe devices or at least raw partitions to achieve top
| performance... basically cutting out the NTFS filesystem
| too from the code path. NTFS is extremely old and complex
| to implement, meaning that a "tiny" file system e.g.
| without journalling, permissions, ACLs and the likes makes
| more sense.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I don't know enough about Windows / NTFS to be an
| authority here. But from what you're saying it sounds
| like the block storage now massively outperforms the
| filesystem (NTFS). So in that aspect NTFS hasn't gotten
| slower, but it has failed to keep up. So cutting it out
| would in fact provide a massive performance boost.
| mschuster91 wrote:
| It's not just the file system.
|
| Currently, when you have a game with say 10k separate
| asset files, you either place 10k asset files in the file
| system (which is slow because NTFS) or you develop some
| sort of your own virtual read-only filesystem on top of
| that (which has been done for decades too, see e.g. the
| WAD format created for Doom). And there have been _many_
| implementations for these, and yet they suffer from two
| things: the OS filesystem cache can 't know which parts
| of such a package file (aka the index) are relevant to
| always keep in memory, and the game has to copy the
| assets to the GPU.
|
| The general idea, if I get it right, is that
| DirectStorage provides a standardized layer that:
|
| - cuts down on filesystem-related overhead by providing
| its own optimized filesystem (e.g. omitting journals
| because the purpose of the storage is 99.99% read vs
| write), or even if they don't go _that_ far and use
| a-blob-on-NTFS at least to cut down on fopen, fclose etc.
|
| - provides a standard way for game developers to deal
| with the problem "how to package and distribute tons of
| tiny assets and compressing and decompressing them"
|
| - saves context switches across the road, e.g. as
| mentioned eliminate fopen and fclose calls or by copying
| the file contents to the GPU entirely in kernel mode
|
| Nevertheless I'm not sure what outside of copying assets
| to the GPU in kernel mode actually will be the benefit of
| DirectStorage as almost everyone these days uses one of
| the major engines that have all these problems dealt with
| for ages.
| jpalomaki wrote:
| This piece from the article was interesting:
|
| "NVMe devices are not only extremely high bandwidth SSD
| based devices, but they also have hardware data access
| pipes called NVMe queues which are particularly suited to
| gaming workloads. To get data off the drive, an OS submits
| a request to the drive and data is delivered to the app via
| these queues. An NVMe device can have multiple queues and
| each queue can contain many requests at a time. This is a
| perfect match to the parallel and batched nature of modern
| gaming workloads. The DirectStorage programming model
| essentially gives developers direct control over that
| highly optimized hardware."
| Animats wrote:
| That's a real thing for game consoles. The PS5 has 16GB
| of RAM, which is directly accessable by the CPUs, GPU,
| and SSD controller. So you can load an asset directly
| from SSD to GPU memory without a recopy. In a PC, you'd
| have copies from disk to disk drive cache to OS memory to
| user space to GPU memory. Also, in a console, where you
| know exactly what the hardware configuration is, you can
| store the assets in exactly the form the GPU wants.
|
| This has nothing to do with "cloud", though.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| I can see Microsoft making it a requirement to be logged
| in to a cloud service to take advantage of DirectStorage.
| sidewndr46 wrote:
| > This is a perfect match to the parallel and batched
| nature of modern gaming workloads
|
| This sounds like marketing speak. Some 'AAA' games now
| make use of parallelism at the CPU level. Almost all
| games today aren't just single threaded, they are
| laughably single threaded.
|
| At the GPU level, rendering has been parallel to some
| degree since special purpose 3D accelerators showed up
| decades ago. More recently, arbitrary shaders have
| allowed some logic that was previously done of the CPU to
| be moved to the GPU.
|
| Video games are not "parallel" in any sense.
| dspillett wrote:
| A large part of loading delay, either initial load or
| between levels/areas, in some games is getting high-res
| textures and other bulk data from storage into the
| graphics memory. You might think "just cache it in RAM,
| my 6GB graphics card is far smaller than the 32GB sat on
| my motherboard", but there are two issues there:
|
| 1. People who game alot or are just well off might have
| 32GB, but game publishers need to support much lower
| configs than that (the recommended minimum for GTA5 is
| 8GB and it technically supports 4, for the newer
| Cyperpunk 2077 those figures are still only 12GB and 8).
| Last time I saw Steam hardware survey results less than
| 50% of machines surveyed had 16GB or more RAM.
|
| 2. Even if we consider with 16GB to be the minimum for a
| serious gamer, you aren't going to use most of that for
| caching assets. Even if you could use 10GB worth, with a
| massively open play area1 how easy is it to manage which
| 10GB of the assets do you load? Both the games I've
| mentioned weigh in at about 70GB. If the user skimped on
| RAM and GPU to get a nice large fast NVMe drive, being
| able to stream data as directly as possible between that
| drive and the graphics RAM is going to be an attractive
| optimisation, both from initial load and as new assets
| are needed mid-game.
|
| The core game engine not taking full advantage of 16
| cores with of CPU when they are present[2] doesn't mean
| that more direct transfer of data from storage to GPU,
| keeping CPU use to a minimum3, can't be useful. Having
| spare cores lying around is nice, but someone with only 4
| might not have that luxury, and even if you have some
| cores otherwise doing nothing that doesn't mean skipping
| the CPU as much as possible3 can't be noticeably better
| than using a fast core. Even if the CPU does still have
| to be involved, APIs like this could massively reduce
| user-kernel transitions which can be pretty expensive.
|
| [1] this is less of an issue for games that can be easily
| split into more manageable chunks
|
| [2] again, think about the larger part of the market: 4
| cores is still very common
|
| [3] let the game logic running on the CPU decide a
| transfer should happen, then have the transfer go
| directly over the bus instead of via the CPU and/or main
| memory at all
| paulmd wrote:
| 1. "people who are well-off might have NVMe SSDs, but
| most people are using much lower specs than that"
|
| 2. "even taking NVMe SSDs to be the minimum, even the
| people who do have them usually can't afford to allocate
| up to 250GB for a single game, let alone when a shitty
| patching system requires double that to apply a patch".
|
| it's certainly a step forward as far as loading
| technology, don't get me wrong, but it's not about people
| with low-spec systems at all, you _need_ NVMe as a
| minimum ask for this, and you need quite a bit of it.
| dspillett wrote:
| NVMe is a cheaper upgrade than others a gamer on a budget
| might consider, especially if building a new machine
| instead of prolonging the life of a new one. Many
| motherboards support it a little extra cost to those that
| don't and the drives themselves can be little or no more
| expensive than SATA SSD units (quick check: known name
| 1TB NVME unit for inside PS70, few SATA units are even
| that cheap, similarly similar pricing between the types
| at the 1/2TB mark too).
|
| Not sure where you are getting 250GB for a single game
| from (~70 I mentioned, IIRC MSFS is ~130) but that
| supports my point more than counters it: if you might
| shoot through areas quickly and want high-res textures to
| be constantly available (a low fast tour of a significant
| area?) with the amount of RAM on the recommended minimum
| cards (4GB, minimum minimum being available in 2GB
| models) and the recommended minimum system RAM (16GB,
| required minimum being 8) then getting data from disk to
| the GPU as quickly as possible might be more beneficial
| than having more RAM for cache, or more CPU cores, etc.
|
| Yes, a well off gamer with a huge 8K screen who can
| afford to be scalped for a top-of-the-line GFX card is
| going to benefit from this, but so could many others.
|
| The performance difference between NVMe and SATA SSDs is
| nothing like that seen between more traditional drives
| and SSDs, contrary to what much breathless marketing text
| will exclaim, but as there isn't much of a cost
| difference maybe this sort of direct transfer feature
| will change the value for money dynamic a bit more.
| psyc wrote:
| I think this assertion is terribly outdated for 'serious'
| (Console/AAA) games and 'professional' game developers. I
| can remember as far back as 2007 interviewing for an
| XBox360 job, and being asked to describe in detail how I
| would keep all the threads busy. A professional game
| developer working on a serious high-detail/low-latency
| game would not be taken seriously if they don't know how
| to make a work queue.
|
| What you say is probably true of most indie games. That's
| a whole different world. But the 'state of the art' is
| perfectly accurately described by 'batched and parallel
| workloads'.
| manigandham wrote:
| Modern games use multiple threads for more than a decade
| now.
|
| Single-threaded computation is for serialized state
| mutations in the main game loop. Everything else, like
| loading data, can and does happen on other threads. The
| latest engines use a job dispatch system with
| fractured/sharded state to distribute work as much as
| possible across cores.
|
| As far as this topic, loading new data is already done in
| parallel, and can now be further parallelized at the
| block level with built-in APIs with the typical OS
| overhead or custom virtualization layer.
| magicalhippo wrote:
| > Almost all games today aren't just single threaded,
| they are laughably single threaded.
|
| This clearly isn't aimed at your average Unity game. I've
| not seen any big AAA game in the last decade that's
| "laughably single threaded" when it comes to asset
| handling, which this API is all about.
| bri3d wrote:
| > Almost all games today aren't just single threaded,
| they are laughably single threaded.
|
| Many (maybe most, still) games have embarrassingly
| single-threaded game logic (i.e., there's still one
| "runloop" thread which manages game state), but almost
| universally at this point there's a separate thread for
| loading data, decompressing data, asset / script
| compilation, and audio. Many games also use a separate
| thread for physics as well, and some use worker threads
| for AI / rules engine NPC behavior as well.
|
| Anyway, loading data is where the parallel and batched
| nature of modern gaming workloads comes in - almost all
| games at this point do some kind of constant background
| asset loading to avoid the need for load screens between
| areas. This asset loading is almost always done in a
| background thread and is pretty much a 1:1 match for an
| NVMe queue - request the blocks containing the data you
| need, ask to be flagged when a block has been DMAed into
| the memory area you want it in, and then decompress it in
| the background.
| stuu99 wrote:
| >I'm still confused by the existence of APIs like this.
|
| They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's
| been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing
| to take input/output control away from the user, this
| required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers.
| Windows 10 and windows 11 are the beginning of you not
| being able to run or play files or exe's over the next 20
| years as youtube, netflix, the game industry update their
| software to use TPM.
|
| This was from 2001:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure
| _...
|
| Here is a paper explaining what the future of
| files/broadcasts will be like:
|
| https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf
|
| Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our
| PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and
| other software companies will control. They are removing
| ownership of our devices and they needed microsofts help to
| do that.
|
| We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via
| update. Many UWP games only work on certain versions of
| windows.
|
| See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link)
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_w
| a...
|
| They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why
| windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was
| also pushing forced internet connection hard for home
| users.
| NovemberWhiskey wrote:
| My understanding is that it's more that storage has
| increased in speed so much that the overheads of the
| privilege transitions between user and kernel space and the
| synchronous filesystem APIs are the limiting factors at
| this point.
|
| This is why we see specialized mechanisms like io_uring in
| the Linux kernel.
| [deleted]
| markus_zhang wrote:
| I'm wondering if you can serve multiple clients with one fully
| loaded server that has a huge amount of RAMs.
| kotaKat wrote:
| It is equally embarrassing to load over cloud. All it takes
| away is the compute/GPU resource requirements locally.
|
| Controls are also awful right now as you're stuck using the
| Xbox controller - other Xbox compatible flight controllers, as
| well as the keyboard and mouse, aren't available yet in MSFS
| over xCloud. It's not (personally) enjoyable.
| Rebelgecko wrote:
| When I tried it a few days ago, the loading times to open the
| game were fairly bad. Couldn't actually see how long it would
| take to load a flight, because the UI was borked (or non
| intuitive enough that I couldn't figure out how to select a
| departure airport)
| samstave wrote:
| Is it multi-player? Is it waiting for other users with slower
| connects/machines?
| dividuum wrote:
| It has multiplayer features, but that's certainly not the
| case here. Switching off all the online features doesn't
| change the loading time at all. It's just a lot of potential
| to make it faster: When you start FS on my machine it takes 2
| minutes or so with only brief moments of CPU usage exceeding
| 2 of the available 24 cores. All while both GPU and IO are
| basically idle. I'm not sure what's going on. Wouldn't be
| surprised if there's a "GTA online" type of lazyness
| happening somewhere (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut-
| GTA-Online-loading-times...)
| willcipriano wrote:
| Wasn't crackdown 3 supposed to have this tech but it got pulled
| at the last minute? There they were supposed to render the really
| complicated physics like when a building or similar collapses in
| the cloud. Thought it was a great idea at the time.
| rjh29 wrote:
| Sort of, the article is talking about two different things. One
| is using the cloud for data storage (because the full Flight
| Simulator map is huge, streaming off the cloud is basically
| essentially), the other is your standard Stadia-style play the
| whole game via the cloud on any device.
|
| The Crackdown 3 stuff never really got beyond demo stage iirc.
| In fact Microsoft promised all kinds of Xbox One games that
| would interact with Azure, but nothing really came of it:
| https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-crack...
|
| Comparing with games like Red Faction Guerrilla, you have to
| wonder if the cloud is even necessary for physics simulation.
| charles_f wrote:
| Oh good, gives game devs a perfect excuse to start charging a
| recurring fee for what's an infrastructure detail on their side.
| Gotta get those sweet sweet subscription fees.
| [deleted]
| jquery wrote:
| This is undoubtedly one of the primary motivations underpinning
| investment in this area, and makes me quite wary of anything
| coming out of it. Is any of this "cloud gaming" being backed by
| a love of gaming itself? Doesn't feel like it.
| charles_f wrote:
| I mean for Flight Simulator, it's several hundreds of TB of
| data stored on Azure servers for all the maps services - I do
| see the appeal, and it looks like MS is not charging past the
| initial fee. But this seems like a very fringe use-case, I
| don't see a lot of other applicable ones.
| stuu99 wrote:
| There's no reason for any PC game to be back ended and
| require a second computer, they've been stealing PC games
| when they rebranded them mmo's in 1997 with ultima onlnie,
| every "MMO" is just a PC game with it's networking reworked
| to defraud the public of game ownership.
|
| They (the game industry) desperately wanted to kill local
| infinitely copyable binaries once they found out the public
| was computer illiterate in 1997 with ultima online.
|
| You can go get a copy of Neverwinter Nights (2002) where the
| multiplayer abiity to host your own games still exists, that
| was supposed to be the future of PC gaming until the global
| public fell for the mmo scam by Richard garriot and co.
|
| This was supposed to be the future of PC gaming
|
| https://www.gog.com/game/neverwinter_nights_enhanced_edition.
| ..
|
| We already had limitless multiplayer with quake 2 and ANY
| game can be made in a game engine. We could go clone every
| back ended game and return them back to being local apps like
| quake 1-3.
|
| You don't seem to grasp mmo's, steam, uplay, DRM are signs of
| idiocracy. There's no software on the planet that requires an
| internet connection (aka 2nd comptuer).
|
| The whole point of "cloud" computing is just vendor lockin
| and the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in modern
| bullshit language (aka steam drm/mmo's are just mainframe
| model of programming returning).
|
| So the game industry desperately wanted to undo the personal
| computer revolution to end piracy.
|
| See here...
|
| Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23
| years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are
| locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+
| year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take
| input/output control away from the user, this required the
| co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and
| windows 11 are the beginning of you not being able to run or
| play files or exe's over the next 20 years as youtube,
| netflix, the game industry update their software to use TPM.
|
| This was from 2001:
|
| https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_.
| ..
|
| Here is a paper explaining what the future of
| files/broadcasts will be like:
|
| https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf
|
| Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our
| PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and other
| software companies will control. They are removing ownership
| of our devices and they needed microsofts help to do that.
|
| We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via update.
| Many UWP games only work on certain versions of windows.
|
| See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link)
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa.
| ..
|
| They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why
| windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was
| also pushing forced internet connection hard for home users.
| DethNinja wrote:
| Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with current
| hardware costs?
|
| I feel like large companies are pouring money into this with the
| hope that they will be able to lock users into their cloud
| offering. However, it is likely they are losing huge amounts of
| money because of the hardware costs.
| Animats wrote:
| _Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with
| current hardware costs?_
|
| Judging by the ones that have gone broke, no.
|
| "Cloud gaming" of the kind where the game runs on a server and
| the results are sent as video to the client has been tried, on
| and off, for about five years. Most of the early providers are
| gone. The trouble is that each user needs an entire server, one
| comparable to a gamer PC.
|
| Cloud gaming services seem to come in two flavors - expensive,
| and loss leader.
|
| Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month.
| When you connect, they launch a server for you and load your
| environment into it. So you're buying a part-time VM.
| Apparently you can stay connected as long as you want, although
| I'm not sure if there's a limit they are not mentioning up
| front.
|
| NVidia GEForce Now is cheaper. Price is $10/month. You get
| kicked off after 6 hours. For $17/month, you get a better
| server with an NVidia 3080 and 8 hours before being kicked off.
| There's a free tier, where you wait to get in and get kicked
| off after an hour or two. Originally, the prices were lower,
| but that was in the loss leader phase. It also helps that
| NVidia makes GPUs. You can only run games that NVidia has
| ported to that system.
|
| Google Stadia is $10 a month. Games have to be ported to it,
| and there's suspicion it may soon join the long list of former
| Google products.
|
| Vortex's site now says they are no longer accepting new users,
| and their blog is a Google Stadia ad.
| [deleted]
| treis wrote:
| >Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month.
|
| That's surprisingly inexpensive. The graphics card they
| promise is nearly $1,000 by itself. For what you'd spend on a
| DIY build you could probably get 4-5 years of subscription.
| officeplant wrote:
| Keep in mind that the base tier of Google Stadia is
| completely free when it comes to free to play games like
| Destiny 2, or if you buy the game outright.
|
| I still play Cyberpunk 2077 on the free tier of Stadia due to
| a promotion where the game was only $45 and came with a
| controller/chromecast. Sold the hardware to pay for the game
| and now I just play with an Xbox controller on whatever
| computer or phone I'm on at the time.
| popotamonga wrote:
| I am very amazed with GEForce Now. I thought the lag would be
| unbearable. I tried some fortnite and i'm not even a gamer
| and even won some rounds. Astounding. If it's that good for
| fast FPS then it's a no-brainer for slower types of games.
| Would gladly pay 50EUR+/mo if i was a gamer just so i
| wouldn't have to bother to keep upgrading my pc.
| rasz wrote:
| Fortnite is not an FPS, its a slow paced gamepad friendly
| survival base building game.
|
| 'Tim Sweeney described it as "Minecraft meets Left 4
| Dead."'
| GauntletWizard wrote:
| It's quite a bit more than 5 years[1].
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive
| MikusR wrote:
| Microsoft is using Xbox Series X. Nvidia is using their own
| GPUs.
| bentcorner wrote:
| Here's what the Xbox cloud hardware looks like:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s
| treesknees wrote:
| Is this essentially 4 xbox's crammed into a 2U server?
| gnabgib wrote:
| It is 8 xboxs in the 2U chassis apparently (they're
| stacked two high)[0] analysis [1]
|
| [0]: https://external-
| preview.redd.it/Ma7bVRkbUuoM4xhzbJFe3qdTzAZ... [1]: https
| ://www.reddit.com/r/xcloud/comments/gdp48d/project_xclo..
| .
| pjmlp wrote:
| Yep, and this is one of the reasons why devs don't care
| about Stadia, with NVidia and Microsoft offerings they
| basically have to fine tune existing code to cloud
| workloads, not rewrite it from scratch betting into a
| vendor that is know to kill products.
| zitterbewegung wrote:
| Not 100% about this guess that I have but if its "free" it
| probably means that they calculated that they have x% extra
| server availability and they provide that for "free". Google
| Colab makes it obvious when they provide you a GPU but I don't
| know about Microsoft.
| [deleted]
| YPPH wrote:
| Exactly what I was thinking, they can just use spare Azure
| capacity.
| charcircuit wrote:
| The only problem is you need powerful machines with GPUs
| which will only be a small subset of spare capacity.
| bob1029 wrote:
| I think the primary technical challenge is the scale of AAA
| games.
|
| For me, this stuff gets viable when one game studio goes all-in
| on building a streaming-only game experience that considers all
| economics of scaling GPUs.
|
| If you reduce visual fidelity enough, you can get away with a
| lot more clients per host. Hell, depending on how you architect
| things, you might even be able to serve some clients from
| servers that dont even have GPUs.
|
| The upsides of cloud gaming are pretty solid if you can get
| over the caveats. The biggest thing for me would be competitive
| gaming experiences that are guaranteed to not have any
| cheaters. That would feel really nice.
| samstave wrote:
| On similar note, where is HW going once it completes its
| lifecycle in the cloud?
|
| Are pods being donated to schools?
|
| This would be a great idea, is to give a pod to a school with
| management tools etc and teach the kids how to interact with
| effectively [aws/gcp/azure] mgmt tools to build up a skillset
| early and accelerate how the yoots understand what cloud is and
| how its managed.
| quantumduck wrote:
| I could be wrong, but I think the hardware cannot sustain
| outside their servers farms without significant investment in
| the things needed; it's not like the throw away entire server
| racks at a time, the probably only retire small pieces of the
| hardware at a time.
| Urinal_Pube wrote:
| phor wrote:
| It feels like this was part of what Stadia promised, but never
| came to fruition.
| bobbob1921 wrote:
| When I first read this and a few replies it made me think that
| Stadia had been shutdown, but a quick Google search shows this
| is not the case. Am I missing something and perhaps it's planed
| to be shut down? (Or is it just not as successful as was
| anticipated)
| invalidusernam3 wrote:
| Apparently it has apparently been "demoted" within Google.
| The rumour also says it's getting renamed to Google Stream
| and will be licensed out to other companies to build their
| own game streaming platforms. I don't think any of this has
| been confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt
| silisili wrote:
| I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First understand,
| Google will never tell you the truth. Even if they were going
| to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last email to you would
| be to tell you it's not going anywhere.
|
| Stadia shut down its own games division - the group who was
| working on in house games. Then, Stadia said it's going to
| focus mostly on b2b stuff - basically whitelabeling Stadia to
| others.
|
| They've not said they'll shut it down, but the writing is on
| the wall.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| >I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First
| understand, Google will never tell you the truth. Even if
| they were going to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last
| email to you would be to tell you it's not going anywhere.
|
| Oof this rings so true. I hear it SO OFTEN about Google,
| and I can't imagine that this kind of reputation doesn't
| hurt their ability to get folks to choose to build
| services/buy-in to their offerings. Are they just at a
| scale such that they genuinely don't care about concerns
| like this?
| silisili wrote:
| I honestly don't think it's purposeful dishonesty, just
| complete disconnection between groups and/or employees
| and management. I've always said it feels like Google is
| a company where the left hand doesn't know what the right
| is doing. So the Stadia team probably has zero indication
| their product is dead until the day of.
| loudmax wrote:
| Stadia's problem was never technical, it was entirely due to
| bad management. The fact that they got games to play reasonably
| well at reasonably high resolutions is an impressive
| achievement, and it set the foundation to build a dominant
| gaming platform appealing to everyone. Then Stadia's management
| figured out a way to emphasize all of Stadia's weaknesses and
| play down its advantages and price it in such a way to appeal
| to nobody.
|
| Stadia's failure to make an impact in the market despite its
| technical achievements brings to mind the proverb: An army of
| sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a
| sheep.
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Stadia actually worked pretty well the first time I tried it an
| I played a few games no issues, but the first time I tried Xbox
| Cloud Gaming, I got display artifacts and my computer locked
| up. The Windows Store Apps and especially the Xbox app sucks
| compared to steam and have very little going for them.
| endisneigh wrote:
| I'd be more interested in a mesh network where people can
| reliably share their compute when not being used but play their
| own games.
| intrasight wrote:
| I've of the opinion that this is the future of gaming. Hard stuff
| will be done on cloud GPUs.
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