Xbox One’s Cloud Computing Depends On Bandwidth

Microsoft is harnessing the power of cloud computing to gain the competitive edge over its arch rival in the next generation console war. The new Xbox One will come with all bells and whistles attached to reap the maximum benefits of cloud architecture. It will have the backing of Microsoft’s cloud servers to significantly increase the amount of data to be worked on. The potentials of this arrangement are unprecedented but the ground reality is, using it will extensively won’t be that easy. The owner of the Xbox One might not have the bandwidth capacity to download the data swiftly.

This revelation was made by Dan Greenawalt at Gamescom, Germany event. Dan served as the creative director at Turn 10 studios, the same company that brought to us hits like Forza Motorsport 5. According to Dan, cloud servers are a great resource to have in a company’s arsenal, but they can’t currently be used to tweak gameplay or graphics.

The company is currently using the forte of cloud computing which is asynchronous number crunching, declared Dan to Pocket-lint which is a recognizable game industry outlet. He further added that using cloud with the current bandwidth can’t possibly achieve speculations such as synchronously updating every frame. This is not feasible, because users will have to remain connected to the internet all the time.

Instead Turn 10 is going to use the cloud servers for an entirely different purpose. Mimic the real world statistics of players like abilities, skills and techniques and feed it to other player’s game AI to mimic the behavior making the game more challenging. Without cloud, compiling and harvesting such statistics wouldn’t be possible. There is a staggering amount of data to update, but here again the limitation on bandwidth poses a big hurdle.

This is what cloud excels at! Just keep storing astronomical amount of data as and when basis for as long as you require. The data is processed and worked on by the cloud architecture pre-configured for it. Just sit back and relax and let the cloud do the work for you. It’s what Bing does with huge amounts of data, declared by Greenawalt. But all this is again totally reliant on being tethered to the internet of course. This has become a hot topic for some as the launch date for the Xbox One draws nearer. Turn 10 head honcho reassured that an internet connection won’t be the primary requirement for enjoying Forza 5. You can play and fully enjoy it without going online minus the Drivatar feature (mimicry of the real world statistics of player).

If you are not online you won’t be legible for the Drivatar feature. But the silver lining here is that even if players connect randomly they can access the Drivatar. When connected, the cloud servers will kick in trickling down data. Forza Motorsport 5 is a part of Xbox exclusive launch titles. The expected release date for this awesome racing game is November this year.