Nitrous Engine Dev on Cloud Making Consoles Powerful: ‘It’s Never Clear When It Becomes A Benefit’

For all the benefits we’ve heard about cloud computing, there’s still a lot we don’t know about it. While Crackdown 3‘s multiplayer could achieve great things with the power of the cloud, what other benefits could the technology bring?

GamingBolt spoke to Oxide Games’ Dan Baker, Tim Kipp and Brian Wade regarding the Nitrous Engine, the team’s proprietary game engine, and how cloud rendering could benefit the same. Has the team considered looking into it?

“Maybe. There are things we could do. You could do significant rendering calculations on the host and upload them. The way our engines works there are no latency issues. You might see some occasional rendering every now and again. So we haven’t really invested in it. Other than to know the architecture is compatible. From a business standpoint we’re always skeptical when we see cloud computer. The reason why is when you add up all the overhead in a big machine somewhere else, it’s not that expensive to have a machine locally. It’s never clear when it becomes a benefit.”

“I think a lot of it tends to wind up” a cost calculation. I think the cloud tends to be much more successful when you’re aggregating data and crunching numbers and then spitting those results out to a large number of users. From either a shading stand point there’s a reduced bandwidth cost there and there’s latency tolerance. If you look at AI generation and running AI in the cloud that becomes a really interesting idea. Because you can aggregate a lot of different users results, put them together and then dynamically form that data back out to other players. If you’re doing procedural generation of various parts of worlds or things, you’re streaming some of the results down, I think there are a lot of ways that that can work. But you definitely have to be careful about it.”

What are your thoughts on the same? Let us know in the comments, especially with Crackdown 3‘s multiplayer beta set for this Summer.