Ever since the advent of current gen consoles, there has been a lot of speculation regarding how cloud gaming could be a game changer. Microsoft has been touting the so called power of the cloud for quite some time but except a few impressive tech demonstrations, they basically have nothing.

Sony on the other hand has been using the cloud to stream certain PS3 games on the PS4 using their PlayStation Now technology. But the big question remains answered. Can cloud be really used to enhance performance of consoles? Filmic World’s boss John Hable believes that it’s going to be really hard to do it given the current state of infrastructure.

“I can’t comment on any specific applications or timelines. But I can give you an overview of the challenges involved.  In short, it is really, really hard. The idea is certainly tempting. We have all these servers in the cloud. Intuitively it makes sense that we should offload some of our work to these servers but the devil is in the details,” Hable said to GamingBolt.

However, it’s not that simple. The biggest challenge to improve performance lies in combating latency. The hardware sends a signal to a remote server, the server will then process this signal and then the results will be sent back to the console for processing. All of this needs a bit of time which results into lag.

“The main problem is latency.  How long does it take to go from your computer to the cloud and back? It takes time to send data up to the cloud, let the cloud crunch some numbers and send the data back.  In video games we generally need the results of computations right away.  The round-trip time of sending a megabyte up and a megabyte down can easily be several seconds even if you have a broadband connection.”

However that is not the only issue. Lost data packets and signal issues can create obstacles for a consistent gameplay experience.

“Then there are all the things that could go wrong. Wifi signals can have spikes. Packets get lost. How do you recover if the server has a hardware failure?  What if a person on your wifi network starts downloading a big file? What do you do for people with slow internet connections? And of course, how much do those servers cost to use? Just because a computer is in the cloud doesn’t make it free! It’s a very difficult problem.  Not impossible, but very difficult.”

However Hable believes that cloud rendering could result into creative gameplay features but simply offloading stuff to a remote server won’t work.

“What graphics features are in a typical game where you could live with getting the results a few seconds after starting the calculation? Not many. I think that a compelling cloud rendering technique would have to be an amazing new feature that no one has really done before. If we think outside the box there might be some really cool things that we could do. But simply offloading existing work into the cloud is hard to justify because of the roundtrip latency and all the things that can go wrong on a network.”

Stay tuned for our full interview with John Hable next week.

Microsoft’s upcoming API DirectX12 has been under some serious discussion for quite a long time. It’s quoted to be a game changer for PC games development but what about consoles? Since the consoles already have a low level API, will the new APIs such as DX12 and Vulkan make that much of impact compared to what we have seen on PC gaming?

John Hable, Filmic World’s boss and former Naughty Dog developer believes that console games will benefit less from the new APIs. This is because console games are mostly GPU bound compared to PC games which are CPU bound.

“The short answer is that newer APIs will make the CPU faster, but will probably not have much effect on the GPU,” Hable said to GamingBolt.  “The improved APIs change how long it takes for you to tell the GPU what you want it to do, but they have no effect on how long it takes the GPU to actually execute those instructions. ”

“If your game is bottlenecked by the CPU, going to DirectX 12 or Vulkan will greatly help your game. But if you are bottlenecked by the GPU then the updated APIs will help little or not at all. Since many PC games are bottlenecked by the CPU, you will see massive gains there. However console games are usually bottlenecked by the GPU so I would not expect significant changes from newer APIs. The GPU is the same regardless of if you are using OpenGL, DirectX11/12, or Vulkan.”

Hable simplifies the difference between DirectX 11 and DirectX 12 with a straight forward example.

“Let’s say that you are drawing a cute little family of bunnies.  These bunnies are made of triangles and each bunny has its own color map, normal map, etc.  With OpenGL or DirectX 11 you would have to describe each of these bunnies one at a time.  The first bunny has a red color map.  The second bunny has a blue color map.  The third bunny has a green color map.  And every frame you have to tell the GPU the same thing over and over again.”

“DirectX12 and Vulkan are much more efficient.  In the first frame, you can describe all the bunnies to the GPU.  You tell the GPU that there is a red one, a blue one, and a green one.  Then they can all be drawn together.  With DirectX 11 and OpenGL you have to describe all the bunnies every frame but with DirectX 12 and Vulkan you can just say “draw all the bunnies”.  I’m oversimplifying but that is the idea.”

“The key idea is that the communication between the application and the GPU is much more efficient.  You can convey the same information with less overhead.  But the amount of time that it takes to actually render those bunnies is the same.  The GPU does not care if the commands came from DirectX 11/12, OpenGL or Vulkan.  It takes the same amount of time to actually draw those triangles.  But the communication (which takes CPU time) is much faster.”

“So if your game is bottlenecked by the overhead of telling the GPU what you want to do, then the APIs are a huge help.  This situation happens a lot on PC games where you have a powerful card sitting idle because it can draw things faster than it can be told to draw them.  But console games tend to keep the GPU working hard so there are less gains to be made.”

“Although the GPU might make some gains along the way.  Ideally you would render objects from front to back to minimize the amount of overdraw in a scene.  Unfortunately that would have too many state changes and it would take DirectX 11 and OpenGL too long to translate those commands to the GPU.  Many games are intentionally making “bad” decisions for the GPU to help out the driver on the CPU.”

“For example, let’s say that your bunnies have multiplied and now you have 5 red bunnies, 5 blue bunnies, and 5 green bunnies.  For the GPU, the ideal way to render the bunnies is front to back to minimize overdraw.  But the cost of telling the driver to do that would be too slow with DirectX 11 and OpenGL.”

“Telling the GPU to render red, blue, blue, green, red, blue, etc. would have too many state changes.  So you have to render all the red bunnies together, followed by all the blue and green bunnies.  With DirectX 12 and Vulkan, the overhead is low enough that we can render the bunnies in the optimal front to back order.  Of course I’m oversimplifying and there are other considerations but the point is the same.”

Stay tuned for more coverage from our exclusive interview with John Hable in the coming days.

There has been much talk about achieving CG like graphical fidelity in video games. There has always been this pipe dream that in game visuals can look as good as pre-rendered graphics. Regardless of the improvements in hardware, this dream is still a dream. Although in game visuals have improved and have come a long way in the last decade, CG quality visuals is still a challenge for developers.

But this generation is different. The PS4 and Xbox One are quite capable machines. So will we see these consoles getting closer to mimicking high quality CGI seen in movies but in real-time? We raised the same question to Filmic Worlds founder and former Naughty Dog developer, John Hable.

“Honestly, it is hard to say.  I think it will be a very long time.  The current crop of consoles is much better than the previous generation, but the trailers are getting better too,” Hable said to GamingBolt. “If you really want to hit that level of quality then you need staggering triangle counts with really long shaders. Photoreal global illumination is very easy offline but very difficult in realtime.”

So how long will it take before consoles hit such a high level of graphical fidelity?  According to Hable it will take another two console cycles before CG level visuals at 4K could be made possible. “I don’t have a good answer for you, but my guess would be longer than you think.  One more console generation seems too quick.  Maybe in two more generations?  That would be PS6 and the 5th gen Xbox?  And if we need to render in 4k then add another generation which puts us at PS7 and 6th gen Xbox.  It’ll be a while.”

Hable further stated that budgeting is also an issue as movies have millions of dollars that a game developer or publisher could not simply afford. “Of course, they will never fully line up because of the content costs. Trailers and feature-length movies simply have a much higher budget per second than what the full game can afford.  This difference is more than an order of magnitude in some cases.”

What are your thoughts on this matter? Let us know in the comments section below.