Will Microsoft has the server ability to make this a success? Cause if so, impressive…link.
MS has my complete confidence so yes I think they will score a home-run with this.
Agreed. Just wanted others’ opinions 
It should, they spent 10billion into researching for new server technology, throw enough money and your bound to have something
> It should, they spent 10billion into researching for new server technology, throw enough money and your bound to have something
Did they really?
I’m very doubtful about this. Real-time ray tracing, as it is today, requires a ton of processing power. Any practical game engines centered around it are still years away. If the technology was to ever come to consoles, it would only be for cloud gaming, because the Xbox One doesn’t really have the power for ray tracing to begin with.
All in all, I’m really doubtful about that PR talk. No one has gotten ray tracing to work in a realistic scenario on any kind of feasible hardware configuration. I’m very doubtful Microsoft has been any more successful.
> > It should, they spent 10billion into researching for new server technology, throw enough money and your bound to have something
>
> Did they really?
That’s a lot of money to put towards it. Perhaps Microsoft will be the first to make it work?
> That’s a lot of money to put towards it. Perhaps Microsoft will be the first to make it work?
Only a tony fraction of those ten billion dollars will go towards game oriented research. There are a lot more important things in their cloud infrastructure than Xbox Live and its cloud services.
As of now, the problem with ray tracing is cost, and I’m doubtful it can be optimized so much more to make it available next year and not in five years. They could definitely go and buy a ton of servers right now to make that possible. But with how much it costs, they couldn’t break even in eight years even if they were to charge every player a monthly 10$ subscription fee for using the service. There is nothing else to do than wait until more powerful technology becomes cheaper.
> > That’s a lot of money to put towards it. Perhaps Microsoft will be the first to make it work?
>
> Only a tony fraction of those ten billion dollars will go towards game oriented research. There are a lot more important things in their cloud infrastructure than Xbox Live and its cloud services.
>
> As of now, the problem with ray tracing is cost, and I’m doubtful it can be optimized so much more to make it available next year and not in five years. They could definitely go and buy a ton of servers right now to make that possible. But with how much it costs, they couldn’t break even in eight years even if they were to charge every player a monthly 10$ subscription fee for using the service. There is nothing else to do than wait until more powerful technology becomes cheaper.
How do you know it would be a tiny fraction?
Seeing how they spent $100 million alone on the X1 controller it shows they are willing to invest big on the xbox.
With PC, windows phone and xbox being the their three main products it’s fair enough to assume that they will spread the funding equally. Money isn’t a issue for Microsoft and with 300,000 servers scattered around the world and they will probably have more later down the line. There is a good possibility
> How do you know it would be a tiny fraction?
>
> Seeing how they spent $100 million alone on the X1 controller it shows they are willing to invest big on the xbox.
>
> With PC, windows phone and xbox being the their three main products it’s fair enough to assume that they will spread the funding equally. Money isn’t a issue for Microsoft and with 300,000 servers scattered around the world and they will probably have more later down the line. There is a good possibility
In the greater scheme, I’m fairly certain the entertainment division is only a small portion of Microsoft. They get a majority of their revenue from the millions of businesses and institutions that utilize their services.
I have no doubt they have some interest in the Xbox platform, otherwise they would have abandoned it long ago. But I doubt it’s where even a quarter of their interests lies. Even more so, I believe most of the interest in the Xbox platform lies not in games, but things like video streaming. It’s clear that they are more interested in the Xbox as a set-top-box than a dedicated game console.
Microsoft isn’t the kind of company that pours a ton of money into new technology to get the industry moving without it giving any immediate benefits to them. Other than maybe some day in the not-so-near future having something to market their cloud gaming platform with, there isn’t a lot for them to gain from ray tracing. That is in contrast to a company such as Nvidia who, if they mange to show that they have the technology to do ray tracing, can then use it to market their products which are the main source of revenue for them.
Finally, just to give some food for thought on the cost of ray tracing. This is an Nvidia Grid module. It contains 16 GPUs, two 8-core CPUs, 384 GB of memory, and costs 40,000$. With one of those you could probably comfortably host eight players each playing a ray traced game. The processing power should probably be enough to make the game look reasonably good and run reasonably well. The cost per player comes at around 5,000$.
What’s a reasonable price you can expect a player to invest in your service? 250$ a year provided they have the whole game library available to them? That’s only 20 years to break even just on the price of the hardware alone. Now, let’s say with very clever R&D you could get the cost to around 1000$ per player (which would be an enormous improvement). It’d still be four years to break even on the hardware. That’s not even taking into account the maintenance, the power bill, the R&D itself and so on.
It’s not that they will never be able to do it. It’s just that don’t expect ray tracing in your games next year, the year after, not even in three years. The technology is just around the corner, but we need to wait for a couple of processor generations until it becomes viable.
- Can the XB0 render high resolution textures?
Yes.
Is it easy? No. But as I’ve said before, this is the first time the PS is so easy to program for, the XB0 is nearly identical in philosophy for programming for as the 360, it’s just that there is admittedly a seemingly simpler solution to giving raw pixel rendering horsepower.
And Tomb Raider the Definitive Edition uses the subsurface scattering technique right now (But could use the 8% of the resources it’s not using with Kinect, but that’s because it isn’t a single-system optimised engine, optimised for the console as it is.)
- I’ve played the Titanfall BETA and had a 33ms ping to the Eastern server and a 40ms ping to the Central server. I know players closer to those servers get 10ms or less.
No latency isn’t completely removed but it’s only noticeable when it’s 10ms vs 33ms and you’ve gotten used to experience.
And that experience is superb. It’s not LAN but it’s not… Well it’s not now.
This is where Halo is going to shine. Kill-trade windows will be narrowed (not removed, but at least narrowed), 10-20’ melee lunges will all but disappear (someone could choose to play on a far server and it may still happen then), hopefully suddenly supersonic airborne vehicles will cease… Oh and slowdown due to a console having to be a server removed.
Please tell me you know what I mean 
In the short term it’s all about the implementation of features that are practical within technical limitations, so the answer is yes for some elements and no for others. In the long term strategy, potentially within 5-15 years from now yes I feel they’ll be close to making this a reality.
What sort of tech limits? Console local resources/processing, Internet latency, Internet bandwidth, display resolutions/calculations required, cloud processing ability, cloud player demand/load.
What sort of features are practical in the short term? Large textures, content updates (new character models, new armour, new animations, new maps, new AI behaviours, new sounds), background AI, background lighting, persistent global worlds, seamless matchmaking, background loading (no load times), extreme Level of Detail (LOD) systems, shared worlds with mass/regional gamers and more. Perhaps tricks like a latency fall back for graphics or AI loading or dynamically baked in skyboxes.
What sort of features are NOT practical in the short term? AI that you interact with up close during gameplay e.g. not from the cloud, real time cloud lighting, real time cloud graphics, real time or interactive audio.
Basically the inherent latency and lack of downstream/upstream bandwidth that is sustainable creates issues in game from the cloud. As more time passes the latency takes less time and the sustainable bandwidth goes up, when they approach a certain standard local processing via a console could become a relative thing of the past. Do I see that happening 100% soon? No. Do I see MS having great success with dedicated servers, compute cloud for developers and content delivery from the Azure datacentres? Hell yes.
No more black screen for Halo, better player/region matching in game, improved banhammer/anti-cheating, ranks/statistics that are accurate, bullets/melee that is far more accurate and that’s not even going into movie/music/app delivery or content updates for Halo/games. I’m expecting big things out of Xbox One over the next 1-10 years and I’ve already been enjoying the movie service and Killer Instinct plus Titanfall beta online multiplayer quality.
To add, http://blogs.msdn.com/b/directx/p/directx12.aspx, will be coming out.
There’s not information but we’re not dealing with 11.2 here, it’s full out DX12 and coming to the XB0
Of course with a great gaming PC, this opens up a lot, and if the XB0 had more raw power it could be even more amazing, but that isn’t to say that what we will see for the next 5-7 years won’t be something to behold (with the right optimisation that is.)
The XB0 is akin to a Japanese import performance car (funny enough), it’s about optimising everything it has, not throwing what one believes to be raw power, at the road courses intended to take.
As been proven by PS4’s KZ’s use of 960x1080 interlaced framework to produce a 1920x1080 but not native/rendered 1080p60fps image, and by the Order’s 1920x800p30fps to sacrifice outright pixel-clarity and fullscreen for a movie filter experience…
It’s the experience that matters over anything.