Cloud gaming will give a lot more power to developers compared to consoles, because it will be possible to make the servers that are playing the same game work together to calculate more demanding simulations. There is no way for an individual console to compete with that. I expect for this generation of consoles to be surpassed by a lot long before it ends by what is possible on regards to processing power in the cloud.
"To be fair, people have SSDs in their PCs already, so it's not that much of a revolution. Streaming is a very important technology for modern games, so the faster you can stream your data, you can put more of it, and you're going to have higher quality assets, which is pretty much what everybody expects there to be. The big questions are going to be how much memory do you get to actually do that? Is there sufficient memory to fool around with? How much CPU power are we getting? Because that's also important, but it's the classic things that we see with every generation. I mean, how much GPU power do we get? But at the end of the day, it's always going to be more, it's going to be more detailed, it's going to allow us to do more accurate simulations.
I think that the more interesting question is how stuff like Google Stadia will change things. It gives developers something different. In the data center, these machines are connected to each other, and so you could start thinking of doing things like elastic rendering, like make a couple of servers together to do physics simulations that may not be possible on current local hardware. I think you'll see a lot of evolution in this direction."
"When you have an almost uncapped amount of computation sitting in a data centre that you can use to support your game design and ambition – whether it's in vastly superior multiplayer, whether it's in distributed physics, or massive simulation – there are things we can do inside a data center that you could never do inside a discreet, standalone device."
An example of how Stadia can use multiple GPUs to enhance the physics calculations.
"To be fair, people have SSDs in their PCs already, so it's not that much of a revolution. Streaming is a very important technology for modern games, so the faster you can stream your data, you can put more of it, and you're going to have higher quality assets, which is pretty much what everybody expects there to be. The big questions are going to be how much memory do you get to actually do that? Is there sufficient memory to fool around with? How much CPU power are we getting? Because that's also important, but it's the classic things that we see with every generation. I mean, how much GPU power do we get? But at the end of the day, it's always going to be more, it's going to be more detailed, it's going to allow us to do more accurate simulations.
I think that the more interesting question is how stuff like Google Stadia will change things. It gives developers something different. In the data center, these machines are connected to each other, and so you could start thinking of doing things like elastic rendering, like make a couple of servers together to do physics simulations that may not be possible on current local hardware. I think you'll see a lot of evolution in this direction."
"When you have an almost uncapped amount of computation sitting in a data centre that you can use to support your game design and ambition – whether it's in vastly superior multiplayer, whether it's in distributed physics, or massive simulation – there are things we can do inside a data center that you could never do inside a discreet, standalone device."
An example of how Stadia can use multiple GPUs to enhance the physics calculations.
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