Microsoft has established a strong foothold in console industry thanks to the Xbox. With the Xbox One X already up for preorder, the hoopla around the new console has soared sky high. Most of the fans are excited at the possibility of native 4K gaming, however, thanks to the 4K upscale the size of games is increasing. In fact games like Forza are 100GB in size and this makes it difficult to handle.
In an interview with GamesRadar, Microsoft Corporate VP Mike Ybarra said that the company is addressing this problem with a unique solution. He further pointed towards the company’s research which involves using the cloud to lessen the impact of the games on the storage.
On the platform side [we’re] looking at things like what we call internally ‘Intelligent Delivery’. It’s basically a way of reducing the footprint a game will have on your storage space. The technology effectively says, ‘Hey, here’s the bits you need for this section’ and keep the rest on the Cloud. So this is how the technology would work, the game will be streamed via an intelligent engine that will decide on which assets to be delivered based on the requirements. This works differently as opposed to the video streaming.
So this is how the technology would work, the game will be streamed via an intelligent engine that will decide on which assets to be delivered based on the requirements. This works differently as opposed to the video streaming.
Ybarra also mentioned how gamers usually have more storage than they actually need. Most of the gamers will prefer moving the game to the cloud in order to free up the local storage. Titanfall and Forza have apparently experimented with cloud based storage and both the titles are making use of the online servers. That being said a majority of cloud computing implementation is yet to offer a solution for time critical operation. On the other hand, downloading gigabytes of data for every gaming level will hamper the experience.
Needless to say, the new implementation will be scarred by problems like graphics rendering and the bandwidth issue on the user’s end. For instance, I subscribe to a broadband plan that gives me 250GB Data every month and if my Xbox starts hogging the bandwidth the data plan will no longer be sufficient for me. All said and done it would be interesting to see what Microsoft will bring to the table with the new cloud implementation.
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