Hasta La Gadget!

One of the Xbox launch’s big reveals was that Microsoft added 300,000 servers to Xbox Live, and now GM Matt Booty has detailed to Ars Technica how that’ll improve game play. He said the improved cloud architecture will speed up GPU- or CPU-heavy chores that aren’t dependent on latency — like lighting or cloth dynamics — by pre-calculating them before applying them to a scene. To make that happen, the Xbox One server cloud will provide three virtual devices for “every Xbox one available in your living room.” It’ll be up to game developers to manage transitions between console-only and cloud assisted graphics, though, since the first few seconds of lighting in a new scene will need to be handled by the console before servers can take over. Of course, that means many titles may look better when you’re online, but he added that you’ll still be able to play if the internet is cut and “the game is going to have to intelligently handle that.”

Filed under: Gaming, Microsoft

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Source: Ars Technica

Lag: it’s the bane of video chats, VoIP calls and Call of Duty players trying to keep a streak going. The European Commission must be as irked by delays and drops as we are, as it’s giving €3.6 million ($4.8 million) over three years to help three universities, Alcatel-Lucent Bell, Institut Mines-Telecom and Simula Research Labs defeat lag through the RITE (Reduce Internet Transport Latency) Project. The initiative hopes to find new ways to cut lag on both the network itself as well as endpoints, like servers. If the networking research alliance hits the jackpot, it hopes to make standards of any proposed changes. Without a specific direction, it’s not clear that RITE will lead to instant-response connections. Should there be much success, however, we’ll only have ourselves to blame for flaky gameplay.

Filed under: Gaming, Networking, Internet, Alt

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Via: The Register

Source: University of Aberdeen