Crackdown 3 will be the first Xbox One title to deliver on Microsoft’s pitch of gaming assisted by ‘the power of the cloud,’ all the way back in 2013, and it does so thanks to Cloudgine’s impressive cloud processing technology. But how exactly does this technology work on the Xbox One? How does it translate to Microsoft’s machine? GamingBolt had a chance to find out just how this occurs, in an interview we had with Cloudgine CEO Maurizio Sciglio recently.
“We are not increasing the power of any specific Xbox One subsystem,” he said. “We are enhancing the gaming experience by using compute power and memory that is available server-side. We offload the expensive computations to Microsoft Cloud through our platform and send the results back to the Xbox One for rendering.”
Essentially, it’s a form of outsourcing- the Xbox One delegates some higher (or lower) level processing to a substantially more powerful computer that it is connected to via the cloud, while it performs other calculations locally. The server farm then does the required computations, and sends them back to your Xbox, which, conjoining them with its local calculations, delivers a cloud assisted experience.
What this means, then, is that theoretically, it would be possible to run a game on Xbox One that is far, far more demanding than what the Xbox One is capable of providing.
“The platform itself doesn’t impose any hard limit on the number of servers. This number is determined by game design and cost considerations. Different games will strike a different balance between cost and compute resources, depending on their requirements and business models.”
It is an exciting and alluring picture of the future, that’s for sure- the question, of course, remains as to whether it is something that is feasible in the short run.
Keep an eye on GamingBolt for our full interview with Sciglio, which should be up soon.