Another area of interest these days is cloud computing, especially given Microsoft’s demonstration of its capabilities with Crackdown 3. Several other areas of gaming like PlayStation Now and Frontier’s Elite Dangerous use cloud computing in their own right. However, how will this help fuel graphics and newer scenarios in the coming years? Will there be more reliance on the cloud and less on the actual hardware of the console?
“I’m entirely convinced that some of the routes we are investing money in right now will prove to be financially and environmentally unable to scale. However, the cloud is here to stay and we will fail many times before we find ways to exploit it in the long run,” Don Williamson, founder of Celtoys said to GamingBolt.
“If we break the typical game engine pipeline into pieces there are many parts that offer unique opportunities for distribution. Imagine the creation of this new cloud infrastructure how you would the evolution of 3D engines written in software, to their modern-day GPU accelerated counterparts: we’re trying to create a big GPU in the sky.”
He then talks about the benefits of cloud gaming and how complex graphical parameters such as global illumination and geometry patterns can be rendered on remotely located machines, whilst being shared by many players.
“Even if players aren’t part of the same session, they’ll be exploring the same worlds. Work such as global illumination, visibility, spatial reasoning and complex geometry optimisation can be factored into their low frequency contributors, clustered, computed and cached on machines thousands of miles away, to be shared between many players. Whatever client hardware is used to retrieve this data will augment that in ways that don’t make sense to distribute.”
Don also suggests that the cloud can also be used to write down the entire game engine on whatever platform you want to play the game on.
“Of course the other element to cloud rendering is the ability to write an engine once for the target platform that can be distributed live to many varying devices on your wrist, in your pocket or on a screen in your lounge. We already have examples of this working really well on your local network (e.g. the Wii-U) but I think there’s a long way to go before the issues of latency and cost are solved.”
What are your thoughts on Don’s statements? Sound off in the comments section below and stay tuned for our complete interview soon.
