[HN Gopher] Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with ... ___________________________________________________________________ Microsoft Flight Simulator's cloud debut comes with upsides for devs Author : jamesdco Score : 70 points Date : 2022-03-07 13:45 UTC (9 hours ago) (HTM) web link (www.gamedeveloper.com) (TXT) w3m dump (www.gamedeveloper.com) | dividuum wrote: | I wonder how they implement fast loading times. Flight simulator | is embarrassingly slow to load and takes 2-3 minutes on my | reasonable fast machine. I guess they have fully loaded game | instances on standby and then sign you in once you connect using | the mentioned new cloud gaming API? | Animats wrote: | That's an interesting issue for the "metaverse". Once we get | past the NFT clown car era, and big-world systems with user | created content at high resolution come out, metaverse systems | will have to face the bandwidth problem Second Life faces. | Delivering assets to the user needs more bandwidth than | delivering video. Even 4K video. Second Life delivers content | on the fly, and you get to watch stuff appear as content comes | in. With enough bandwidth and a gamer PC, it's not bad, but | many users are on slow links with weak clients, and suffer | badly. | | If the work is being done "in the cloud", there can be much | more bandwidth to the asset servers. At least 10GB between game | machine and asset store, all within the data center. Flight | Simulator needs that, because, like Google Earth, they have a | whole planet of assets. A Ready Player One quality metaverse | will have the same problem. Or, for example, the Matrix demo | for Unreal Engine 5, where you download 16 square kilometers of | highly detailed city. | | There are performance downsides of cloud gaming. Too much lag, | mostly. Speed of light alone is too much slowdown to allow | remote VR rendering. At 120 FPS, a few hundred miles of | transmission delay alone costs a frame time. Network delay | makes it worse. You can't buffer the video ahead, like you can | for pre-stored video. The pew-pew crowd gets unhappy above | 40ms, although there are tricks for FPS games to make targeting | work across laggy links. | sandos wrote: | Pre-loaded machines work, but I imagine you would have to move | away from that once you support enough games, but it should be | "easy" to just resume a machine to different games start states | from disk. Afaik games are mostly using lots of CPU when | starting so youre basically pre-computing all that and using | the disk as a look-up table. | [deleted] | [deleted] | EMM_386 wrote: | > I wonder how they implement fast loading times | | Proper DX12 is still on the roadmap. | | They will do it like this: | | https://devblogs.microsoft.com/directx/directstorage-is-comi... | sidewndr46 wrote: | I'm still confused by the existence of APIs like this. Why | would a video game suddenly need a proprietary way to access | a storage device? Have hard drives & filesystems gotten that | much slower over the past 20 years? | mkr-hn wrote: | Games already use virtual file systems for storing assets | to reduce load times. Otherwise they have to load a bunch | of tiny files with filesystem and OS overhead for each. I'm | sure some would appreciate not having to invent their own. | sidewndr46 wrote: | In that case aren't you talking about read-only asset | packs? Those have been around for years and aren't very | complex to implement. Big studios already have their own | implementations. There are plenty of "free as in beer" | implementations out there to use. | mkr-hn wrote: | This is true of every aspect of game development DirectX | implements an API for, but it's still popular. I don't | know enough to know why, but there's probably a good | reason for that. | EMM_386 wrote: | > Big studios already have their own implementations. | | Hence the API. | kevingadd wrote: | It skips a couple layers of abstraction to enable faster | load times, the goal here is to improve over the state of | the art - the promise of 'no load times' sometimes | delivered by the PS5 and Xbox Series X via this same | approach | | Some PC ports are already getting close to this as well - | elden ring's load times are very short on my PC. | | It's also hard to overstate how much of an improvement it | is to have an NVMe drive send data directly to the GPU | instead of have to send it via the CPU. The amount of | pointless work involved in the CPU hop is pretty | significant. | sidewndr46 wrote: | I guess the thing that really makes NVMe -> GPU really | practical is the presence of arbitrary shader code. Even | if your assets are some general or optimized format, you | can run an arbitrary shader that copies from one buffer | to another in order to get stuff in the right format. | paulmd wrote: | actually it's rather the opposite, the focus is on fixed- | function decoder blocks that are present in the new | consoles. | mschuster91 wrote: | If I understand that announcement correctly, most of the | performance benefit comes from cutting down the number of | kernel-to-userspace transitions, similar to userspace | networking on Linux. | | Another possibility is that DirectStorage requires use of | raw NVMe devices or at least raw partitions to achieve top | performance... basically cutting out the NTFS filesystem | too from the code path. NTFS is extremely old and complex | to implement, meaning that a "tiny" file system e.g. | without journalling, permissions, ACLs and the likes makes | more sense. | sidewndr46 wrote: | I don't know enough about Windows / NTFS to be an | authority here. But from what you're saying it sounds | like the block storage now massively outperforms the | filesystem (NTFS). So in that aspect NTFS hasn't gotten | slower, but it has failed to keep up. So cutting it out | would in fact provide a massive performance boost. | mschuster91 wrote: | It's not just the file system. | | Currently, when you have a game with say 10k separate | asset files, you either place 10k asset files in the file | system (which is slow because NTFS) or you develop some | sort of your own virtual read-only filesystem on top of | that (which has been done for decades too, see e.g. the | WAD format created for Doom). And there have been _many_ | implementations for these, and yet they suffer from two | things: the OS filesystem cache can 't know which parts | of such a package file (aka the index) are relevant to | always keep in memory, and the game has to copy the | assets to the GPU. | | The general idea, if I get it right, is that | DirectStorage provides a standardized layer that: | | - cuts down on filesystem-related overhead by providing | its own optimized filesystem (e.g. omitting journals | because the purpose of the storage is 99.99% read vs | write), or even if they don't go _that_ far and use | a-blob-on-NTFS at least to cut down on fopen, fclose etc. | | - provides a standard way for game developers to deal | with the problem "how to package and distribute tons of | tiny assets and compressing and decompressing them" | | - saves context switches across the road, e.g. as | mentioned eliminate fopen and fclose calls or by copying | the file contents to the GPU entirely in kernel mode | | Nevertheless I'm not sure what outside of copying assets | to the GPU in kernel mode actually will be the benefit of | DirectStorage as almost everyone these days uses one of | the major engines that have all these problems dealt with | for ages. | jpalomaki wrote: | This piece from the article was interesting: | | "NVMe devices are not only extremely high bandwidth SSD | based devices, but they also have hardware data access | pipes called NVMe queues which are particularly suited to | gaming workloads. To get data off the drive, an OS submits | a request to the drive and data is delivered to the app via | these queues. An NVMe device can have multiple queues and | each queue can contain many requests at a time. This is a | perfect match to the parallel and batched nature of modern | gaming workloads. The DirectStorage programming model | essentially gives developers direct control over that | highly optimized hardware." | Animats wrote: | That's a real thing for game consoles. The PS5 has 16GB | of RAM, which is directly accessable by the CPUs, GPU, | and SSD controller. So you can load an asset directly | from SSD to GPU memory without a recopy. In a PC, you'd | have copies from disk to disk drive cache to OS memory to | user space to GPU memory. Also, in a console, where you | know exactly what the hardware configuration is, you can | store the assets in exactly the form the GPU wants. | | This has nothing to do with "cloud", though. | sidewndr46 wrote: | I can see Microsoft making it a requirement to be logged | in to a cloud service to take advantage of DirectStorage. | sidewndr46 wrote: | > This is a perfect match to the parallel and batched | nature of modern gaming workloads | | This sounds like marketing speak. Some 'AAA' games now | make use of parallelism at the CPU level. Almost all | games today aren't just single threaded, they are | laughably single threaded. | | At the GPU level, rendering has been parallel to some | degree since special purpose 3D accelerators showed up | decades ago. More recently, arbitrary shaders have | allowed some logic that was previously done of the CPU to | be moved to the GPU. | | Video games are not "parallel" in any sense. | dspillett wrote: | A large part of loading delay, either initial load or | between levels/areas, in some games is getting high-res | textures and other bulk data from storage into the | graphics memory. You might think "just cache it in RAM, | my 6GB graphics card is far smaller than the 32GB sat on | my motherboard", but there are two issues there: | | 1. People who game alot or are just well off might have | 32GB, but game publishers need to support much lower | configs than that (the recommended minimum for GTA5 is | 8GB and it technically supports 4, for the newer | Cyperpunk 2077 those figures are still only 12GB and 8). | Last time I saw Steam hardware survey results less than | 50% of machines surveyed had 16GB or more RAM. | | 2. Even if we consider with 16GB to be the minimum for a | serious gamer, you aren't going to use most of that for | caching assets. Even if you could use 10GB worth, with a | massively open play area1 how easy is it to manage which | 10GB of the assets do you load? Both the games I've | mentioned weigh in at about 70GB. If the user skimped on | RAM and GPU to get a nice large fast NVMe drive, being | able to stream data as directly as possible between that | drive and the graphics RAM is going to be an attractive | optimisation, both from initial load and as new assets | are needed mid-game. | | The core game engine not taking full advantage of 16 | cores with of CPU when they are present[2] doesn't mean | that more direct transfer of data from storage to GPU, | keeping CPU use to a minimum3, can't be useful. Having | spare cores lying around is nice, but someone with only 4 | might not have that luxury, and even if you have some | cores otherwise doing nothing that doesn't mean skipping | the CPU as much as possible3 can't be noticeably better | than using a fast core. Even if the CPU does still have | to be involved, APIs like this could massively reduce | user-kernel transitions which can be pretty expensive. | | [1] this is less of an issue for games that can be easily | split into more manageable chunks | | [2] again, think about the larger part of the market: 4 | cores is still very common | | [3] let the game logic running on the CPU decide a | transfer should happen, then have the transfer go | directly over the bus instead of via the CPU and/or main | memory at all | paulmd wrote: | 1. "people who are well-off might have NVMe SSDs, but | most people are using much lower specs than that" | | 2. "even taking NVMe SSDs to be the minimum, even the | people who do have them usually can't afford to allocate | up to 250GB for a single game, let alone when a shitty | patching system requires double that to apply a patch". | | it's certainly a step forward as far as loading | technology, don't get me wrong, but it's not about people | with low-spec systems at all, you _need_ NVMe as a | minimum ask for this, and you need quite a bit of it. | dspillett wrote: | NVMe is a cheaper upgrade than others a gamer on a budget | might consider, especially if building a new machine | instead of prolonging the life of a new one. Many | motherboards support it a little extra cost to those that | don't and the drives themselves can be little or no more | expensive than SATA SSD units (quick check: known name | 1TB NVME unit for inside PS70, few SATA units are even | that cheap, similarly similar pricing between the types | at the 1/2TB mark too). | | Not sure where you are getting 250GB for a single game | from (~70 I mentioned, IIRC MSFS is ~130) but that | supports my point more than counters it: if you might | shoot through areas quickly and want high-res textures to | be constantly available (a low fast tour of a significant | area?) with the amount of RAM on the recommended minimum | cards (4GB, minimum minimum being available in 2GB | models) and the recommended minimum system RAM (16GB, | required minimum being 8) then getting data from disk to | the GPU as quickly as possible might be more beneficial | than having more RAM for cache, or more CPU cores, etc. | | Yes, a well off gamer with a huge 8K screen who can | afford to be scalped for a top-of-the-line GFX card is | going to benefit from this, but so could many others. | | The performance difference between NVMe and SATA SSDs is | nothing like that seen between more traditional drives | and SSDs, contrary to what much breathless marketing text | will exclaim, but as there isn't much of a cost | difference maybe this sort of direct transfer feature | will change the value for money dynamic a bit more. | psyc wrote: | I think this assertion is terribly outdated for 'serious' | (Console/AAA) games and 'professional' game developers. I | can remember as far back as 2007 interviewing for an | XBox360 job, and being asked to describe in detail how I | would keep all the threads busy. A professional game | developer working on a serious high-detail/low-latency | game would not be taken seriously if they don't know how | to make a work queue. | | What you say is probably true of most indie games. That's | a whole different world. But the 'state of the art' is | perfectly accurately described by 'batched and parallel | workloads'. | manigandham wrote: | Modern games use multiple threads for more than a decade | now. | | Single-threaded computation is for serialized state | mutations in the main game loop. Everything else, like | loading data, can and does happen on other threads. The | latest engines use a job dispatch system with | fractured/sharded state to distribute work as much as | possible across cores. | | As far as this topic, loading new data is already done in | parallel, and can now be further parallelized at the | block level with built-in APIs with the typical OS | overhead or custom virtualization layer. | magicalhippo wrote: | > Almost all games today aren't just single threaded, | they are laughably single threaded. | | This clearly isn't aimed at your average Unity game. I've | not seen any big AAA game in the last decade that's | "laughably single threaded" when it comes to asset | handling, which this API is all about. | bri3d wrote: | > Almost all games today aren't just single threaded, | they are laughably single threaded. | | Many (maybe most, still) games have embarrassingly | single-threaded game logic (i.e., there's still one | "runloop" thread which manages game state), but almost | universally at this point there's a separate thread for | loading data, decompressing data, asset / script | compilation, and audio. Many games also use a separate | thread for physics as well, and some use worker threads | for AI / rules engine NPC behavior as well. | | Anyway, loading data is where the parallel and batched | nature of modern gaming workloads comes in - almost all | games at this point do some kind of constant background | asset loading to avoid the need for load screens between | areas. This asset loading is almost always done in a | background thread and is pretty much a 1:1 match for an | NVMe queue - request the blocks containing the data you | need, ask to be flagged when a block has been DMAed into | the memory area you want it in, and then decompress it in | the background. | stuu99 wrote: | >I'm still confused by the existence of APIs like this. | | They are locking down IO with trusted computing, there's | been a 23+ year initiative to move to encrypted computing | to take input/output control away from the user, this | required the co-operation of hardware manufacturers. | Windows 10 and windows 11 are the beginning of you not | being able to run or play files or exe's over the next 20 | years as youtube, netflix, the game industry update their | software to use TPM. | | This was from 2001: | | https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure | _... | | Here is a paper explaining what the future of | files/broadcasts will be like: | | https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf | | Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our | PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and | other software companies will control. They are removing | ownership of our devices and they needed microsofts help to | do that. | | We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via | update. Many UWP games only work on certain versions of | windows. | | See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link) | | https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_w | a... | | They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why | windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was | also pushing forced internet connection hard for home | users. | NovemberWhiskey wrote: | My understanding is that it's more that storage has | increased in speed so much that the overheads of the | privilege transitions between user and kernel space and the | synchronous filesystem APIs are the limiting factors at | this point. | | This is why we see specialized mechanisms like io_uring in | the Linux kernel. | [deleted] | markus_zhang wrote: | I'm wondering if you can serve multiple clients with one fully | loaded server that has a huge amount of RAMs. | kotaKat wrote: | It is equally embarrassing to load over cloud. All it takes | away is the compute/GPU resource requirements locally. | | Controls are also awful right now as you're stuck using the | Xbox controller - other Xbox compatible flight controllers, as | well as the keyboard and mouse, aren't available yet in MSFS | over xCloud. It's not (personally) enjoyable. | Rebelgecko wrote: | When I tried it a few days ago, the loading times to open the | game were fairly bad. Couldn't actually see how long it would | take to load a flight, because the UI was borked (or non | intuitive enough that I couldn't figure out how to select a | departure airport) | samstave wrote: | Is it multi-player? Is it waiting for other users with slower | connects/machines? | dividuum wrote: | It has multiplayer features, but that's certainly not the | case here. Switching off all the online features doesn't | change the loading time at all. It's just a lot of potential | to make it faster: When you start FS on my machine it takes 2 | minutes or so with only brief moments of CPU usage exceeding | 2 of the available 24 cores. All while both GPU and IO are | basically idle. I'm not sure what's going on. Wouldn't be | surprised if there's a "GTA online" type of lazyness | happening somewhere (see https://nee.lv/2021/02/28/How-I-cut- | GTA-Online-loading-times...) | willcipriano wrote: | Wasn't crackdown 3 supposed to have this tech but it got pulled | at the last minute? There they were supposed to render the really | complicated physics like when a building or similar collapses in | the cloud. Thought it was a great idea at the time. | rjh29 wrote: | Sort of, the article is talking about two different things. One | is using the cloud for data storage (because the full Flight | Simulator map is huge, streaming off the cloud is basically | essentially), the other is your standard Stadia-style play the | whole game via the cloud on any device. | | The Crackdown 3 stuff never really got beyond demo stage iirc. | In fact Microsoft promised all kinds of Xbox One games that | would interact with Azure, but nothing really came of it: | https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2019-crack... | | Comparing with games like Red Faction Guerrilla, you have to | wonder if the cloud is even necessary for physics simulation. | charles_f wrote: | Oh good, gives game devs a perfect excuse to start charging a | recurring fee for what's an infrastructure detail on their side. | Gotta get those sweet sweet subscription fees. | [deleted] | jquery wrote: | This is undoubtedly one of the primary motivations underpinning | investment in this area, and makes me quite wary of anything | coming out of it. Is any of this "cloud gaming" being backed by | a love of gaming itself? Doesn't feel like it. | charles_f wrote: | I mean for Flight Simulator, it's several hundreds of TB of | data stored on Azure servers for all the maps services - I do | see the appeal, and it looks like MS is not charging past the | initial fee. But this seems like a very fringe use-case, I | don't see a lot of other applicable ones. | stuu99 wrote: | There's no reason for any PC game to be back ended and | require a second computer, they've been stealing PC games | when they rebranded them mmo's in 1997 with ultima onlnie, | every "MMO" is just a PC game with it's networking reworked | to defraud the public of game ownership. | | They (the game industry) desperately wanted to kill local | infinitely copyable binaries once they found out the public | was computer illiterate in 1997 with ultima online. | | You can go get a copy of Neverwinter Nights (2002) where the | multiplayer abiity to host your own games still exists, that | was supposed to be the future of PC gaming until the global | public fell for the mmo scam by Richard garriot and co. | | This was supposed to be the future of PC gaming | | https://www.gog.com/game/neverwinter_nights_enhanced_edition. | .. | | We already had limitless multiplayer with quake 2 and ANY | game can be made in a game engine. We could go clone every | back ended game and return them back to being local apps like | quake 1-3. | | You don't seem to grasp mmo's, steam, uplay, DRM are signs of | idiocracy. There's no software on the planet that requires an | internet connection (aka 2nd comptuer). | | The whole point of "cloud" computing is just vendor lockin | and the return of mainframe computing of the 60's in modern | bullshit language (aka steam drm/mmo's are just mainframe | model of programming returning). | | So the game industry desperately wanted to undo the personal | computer revolution to end piracy. | | See here... | | Well if you've bought any client-server app over the last 23 | years its a bit too late for computing freedom. They are | locking down IO with trusted computing, there's been a 23+ | year initiative to move to encrypted computing to take | input/output control away from the user, this required the | co-operation of hardware manufacturers. Windows 10 and | windows 11 are the beginning of you not being able to run or | play files or exe's over the next 20 years as youtube, | netflix, the game industry update their software to use TPM. | | This was from 2001: | | https://www.theregister.com/2001/12/13/the_microsoft_secure_. | .. | | Here is a paper explaining what the future of | files/broadcasts will be like: | | https://web2.qatar.cmu.edu/cs/15349/dl/DRM-TC.pdf | | Basically they are building a parallel mainframe inside our | PC's that only youtube, netflix, the game industry and other | software companies will control. They are removing ownership | of our devices and they needed microsofts help to do that. | | We've seen mirosoft trial bricking cracked exe's via update. | Many UWP games only work on certain versions of windows. | | See here (ctrf-f then select the UWP link) | | https://old.reddit.com/r/CrackWatch/comments/p9ak4n/crack_wa. | .. | | They are bringing console lockdown to the PC that is why | windows 10 had forced updates. That is why windows 11 was | also pushing forced internet connection hard for home users. | DethNinja wrote: | Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with current | hardware costs? | | I feel like large companies are pouring money into this with the | hope that they will be able to lock users into their cloud | offering. However, it is likely they are losing huge amounts of | money because of the hardware costs. | Animats wrote: | _Do these cloud gaming offerings really make a profit with | current hardware costs?_ | | Judging by the ones that have gone broke, no. | | "Cloud gaming" of the kind where the game runs on a server and | the results are sent as video to the client has been tried, on | and off, for about five years. Most of the early providers are | gone. The trouble is that each user needs an entire server, one | comparable to a gamer PC. | | Cloud gaming services seem to come in two flavors - expensive, | and loss leader. | | Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month. | When you connect, they launch a server for you and load your | environment into it. So you're buying a part-time VM. | Apparently you can stay connected as long as you want, although | I'm not sure if there's a limit they are not mentioning up | front. | | NVidia GEForce Now is cheaper. Price is $10/month. You get | kicked off after 6 hours. For $17/month, you get a better | server with an NVidia 3080 and 8 hours before being kicked off. | There's a free tier, where you wait to get in and get kicked | off after an hour or two. Originally, the prices were lower, | but that was in the loss leader phase. It also helps that | NVidia makes GPUs. You can only run games that NVidia has | ported to that system. | | Google Stadia is $10 a month. Games have to be ported to it, | and there's suspicion it may soon join the long list of former | Google products. | | Vortex's site now says they are no longer accepting new users, | and their blog is a Google Stadia ad. | [deleted] | treis wrote: | >Shadow PC is in the expensive category. Price is $30/month. | | That's surprisingly inexpensive. The graphics card they | promise is nearly $1,000 by itself. For what you'd spend on a | DIY build you could probably get 4-5 years of subscription. | officeplant wrote: | Keep in mind that the base tier of Google Stadia is | completely free when it comes to free to play games like | Destiny 2, or if you buy the game outright. | | I still play Cyberpunk 2077 on the free tier of Stadia due to | a promotion where the game was only $45 and came with a | controller/chromecast. Sold the hardware to pay for the game | and now I just play with an Xbox controller on whatever | computer or phone I'm on at the time. | popotamonga wrote: | I am very amazed with GEForce Now. I thought the lag would be | unbearable. I tried some fortnite and i'm not even a gamer | and even won some rounds. Astounding. If it's that good for | fast FPS then it's a no-brainer for slower types of games. | Would gladly pay 50EUR+/mo if i was a gamer just so i | wouldn't have to bother to keep upgrading my pc. | rasz wrote: | Fortnite is not an FPS, its a slow paced gamepad friendly | survival base building game. | | 'Tim Sweeney described it as "Minecraft meets Left 4 | Dead."' | GauntletWizard wrote: | It's quite a bit more than 5 years[1]. | | [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/OnLive | MikusR wrote: | Microsoft is using Xbox Series X. Nvidia is using their own | GPUs. | bentcorner wrote: | Here's what the Xbox cloud hardware looks like: | https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G5g4Xqy8kG4&t=18s | treesknees wrote: | Is this essentially 4 xbox's crammed into a 2U server? | gnabgib wrote: | It is 8 xboxs in the 2U chassis apparently (they're | stacked two high)[0] analysis [1] | | [0]: https://external- | preview.redd.it/Ma7bVRkbUuoM4xhzbJFe3qdTzAZ... [1]: https | ://www.reddit.com/r/xcloud/comments/gdp48d/project_xclo.. | . | pjmlp wrote: | Yep, and this is one of the reasons why devs don't care | about Stadia, with NVidia and Microsoft offerings they | basically have to fine tune existing code to cloud | workloads, not rewrite it from scratch betting into a | vendor that is know to kill products. | zitterbewegung wrote: | Not 100% about this guess that I have but if its "free" it | probably means that they calculated that they have x% extra | server availability and they provide that for "free". Google | Colab makes it obvious when they provide you a GPU but I don't | know about Microsoft. | [deleted] | YPPH wrote: | Exactly what I was thinking, they can just use spare Azure | capacity. | charcircuit wrote: | The only problem is you need powerful machines with GPUs | which will only be a small subset of spare capacity. | bob1029 wrote: | I think the primary technical challenge is the scale of AAA | games. | | For me, this stuff gets viable when one game studio goes all-in | on building a streaming-only game experience that considers all | economics of scaling GPUs. | | If you reduce visual fidelity enough, you can get away with a | lot more clients per host. Hell, depending on how you architect | things, you might even be able to serve some clients from | servers that dont even have GPUs. | | The upsides of cloud gaming are pretty solid if you can get | over the caveats. The biggest thing for me would be competitive | gaming experiences that are guaranteed to not have any | cheaters. That would feel really nice. | samstave wrote: | On similar note, where is HW going once it completes its | lifecycle in the cloud? | | Are pods being donated to schools? | | This would be a great idea, is to give a pod to a school with | management tools etc and teach the kids how to interact with | effectively [aws/gcp/azure] mgmt tools to build up a skillset | early and accelerate how the yoots understand what cloud is and | how its managed. | quantumduck wrote: | I could be wrong, but I think the hardware cannot sustain | outside their servers farms without significant investment in | the things needed; it's not like the throw away entire server | racks at a time, the probably only retire small pieces of the | hardware at a time. | Urinal_Pube wrote: | phor wrote: | It feels like this was part of what Stadia promised, but never | came to fruition. | bobbob1921 wrote: | When I first read this and a few replies it made me think that | Stadia had been shutdown, but a quick Google search shows this | is not the case. Am I missing something and perhaps it's planed | to be shut down? (Or is it just not as successful as was | anticipated) | invalidusernam3 wrote: | Apparently it has apparently been "demoted" within Google. | The rumour also says it's getting renamed to Google Stream | and will be licensed out to other companies to build their | own game streaming platforms. I don't think any of this has | been confirmed, so take it with a pinch of salt | silisili wrote: | I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First understand, | Google will never tell you the truth. Even if they were going | to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last email to you would | be to tell you it's not going anywhere. | | Stadia shut down its own games division - the group who was | working on in house games. Then, Stadia said it's going to | focus mostly on b2b stuff - basically whitelabeling Stadia to | others. | | They've not said they'll shut it down, but the writing is on | the wall. | ChicagoBoy11 wrote: | >I follow Stadia a bit, will try to answer. First | understand, Google will never tell you the truth. Even if | they were going to shut it down in 10 minutes, their last | email to you would be to tell you it's not going anywhere. | | Oof this rings so true. I hear it SO OFTEN about Google, | and I can't imagine that this kind of reputation doesn't | hurt their ability to get folks to choose to build | services/buy-in to their offerings. Are they just at a | scale such that they genuinely don't care about concerns | like this? | silisili wrote: | I honestly don't think it's purposeful dishonesty, just | complete disconnection between groups and/or employees | and management. I've always said it feels like Google is | a company where the left hand doesn't know what the right | is doing. So the Stadia team probably has zero indication | their product is dead until the day of. | loudmax wrote: | Stadia's problem was never technical, it was entirely due to | bad management. The fact that they got games to play reasonably | well at reasonably high resolutions is an impressive | achievement, and it set the foundation to build a dominant | gaming platform appealing to everyone. Then Stadia's management | figured out a way to emphasize all of Stadia's weaknesses and | play down its advantages and price it in such a way to appeal | to nobody. | | Stadia's failure to make an impact in the market despite its | technical achievements brings to mind the proverb: An army of | sheep led by a lion is better than an army of lions led by a | sheep. | encryptluks2 wrote: | Stadia actually worked pretty well the first time I tried it an | I played a few games no issues, but the first time I tried Xbox | Cloud Gaming, I got display artifacts and my computer locked | up. The Windows Store Apps and especially the Xbox app sucks | compared to steam and have very little going for them. | endisneigh wrote: | I'd be more interested in a mesh network where people can | reliably share their compute when not being used but play their | own games. | intrasight wrote: | I've of the opinion that this is the future of gaming. Hard stuff | will be done on cloud GPUs. ___________________________________________________________________ (page generated 2022-03-07 23:01 UTC)