Yoshida ‘totally doesn’t understand’ Xbox One’s cloud computing

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Sony Worldwide Studios boss Shuhei Yoshida has branded Microsoft’s messaging over Xbox One’s cloud computing capabilities as “confusing”, and admitted that he “totally doesn’t understand” the way his rival plans to use cloud processing.

Yoshida

“We’ve been clear on what cloud gaming means, and that’s getting games to run on the server and sending that video signal to a distant device,” Yoshida told GamesIndustry.biz.

“The way they are using cloud computing seems very different and I totally don’t understand what they mean by that. So we can’t react to what they are saying because we don’t understand.”

Yoshida admits that he had to read an article produced by tech experts Digital Foundry to get an understanding of Microsoft’s plans, but suggests that he still doesn’t fully understand how it will work.

“[Digital Foundry] went through all the computing tasks a game goes through,” Yoshida continued, “and for each one they checked off if it can actually be done on the server versus the client, and most of the tasks a game has to perform, they said, cannot be done on the server because of the huge latency and the bandwidth.

“There’s so much data going back and forth between the CPU and memory and GPU inside the console compared to going through the internet… There were maybe four or five tasks that actually could be done on the server. So that was very educational to me. After reading the article, the Microsoft message was even more confusing to me.”

Microsoft claims that it is able to offload local CPU processes to the cloud in order to improve visual fidelity and offer advanced AI.

The first Xbox One game to make the use of the cloud appears to be Forza Motorsport 5, which pulls data from the cloud to create ‘Drivatars’, a form of AI driver based on player behaviour.

Titanfall is also said to use the cloud to create “a bigger world, more physics, lots of AI, and potentially a lot more than that”.

Sony’s cloud streaming service Gaikai is expected to launch for PS4 in the US next year. Plans have yet to be announced for its European rollout.

PlayStation 4 launches in the US tomorrow, November 15, and in the UK on November 29.

Source: gamesindustry.biz

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