What Xbox Live Compute (Microsoft's cloud) means for you (interview)

Keeping Xbox Live on top

Over the life of the Xbox 360, Microsoft’s Xbox Live established a reputation as the top online-gaming service. The company’s cloud initiative is a big part of helping it maintain that position going forward.

Xbox Live currently has 48 million members. Microsoft won’t disclose what percentage pays the subscription fee for the Xbox Live Gold premium tier, but it is not an insignificant number. It’s also not an insignificant amount of revenue. The company wants to keep Xbox Live on top so it can continue collecting that cash on a regular basis.

Sony has slowly built up its PlayStation Plus subscription service as a competitor by offering full retail games for free to subscribers. On PlayStation 4, Sony will also require Plus for players to connect to multiplayer gaming — just like Xbox Live. The generational switch could provide many gamers with the opportunity to jump ship from one console and online service to another. That’s pushing Microsoft to improve its service. It’s counting on the cloud features to help keep Xbox Live relevant.

Extending the power of Xbox One

Xbox Live Compute isn’t just about dedicated servers for online shooters. Microsoft developer Turn 10 is using the cloud in its upcoming game, Forza Motorsport 5, to power its Drivatar system. This is the racing game’s artificial-intelligence system that enables the title to create an online representation of each player that drives like they do. Forza’s overall computer-controlled opponent intelligence will also improve as Xbox Live Compute breaks down and incorporates all the data from every player.

These are examples of CPU operations that developers now have can choose to perform locally on the console or remotely on a server. Typically, a computer’s CPU handles math-heavy computations like enemy A.I. and the rules and systems of a game world. The GPU handles things like lighting and the polygons. These are just examples, since the Xbox One uses an AMD APU chip that combines the CPU and GPU.

Above: Looking down a rifle’s scope in Call of Duty: Ghosts.

Image Credit: Activision

“Whatever a developer decides to do locally, it could take away from some other operation it intends to perform,” says Bruno. “Giving the ability to unload some jobs does free up some resources to maybe give a higher-fidelity experience.”

Right now, however, Xbox One won’t unload any of its GPU calculations into the cloud. That means an Xbox One’s games visuals are still mostly determined within the box itself. The main issue for the visuals is that GPU information is very sensitive to latency. It likely can’t wait for the data to travel back and forth across an Internet line.

“It’s not that we aren’t able to do [GPU calculations in the cloud],” said Bruno. “We made a choice to focus on CPU and not GPU. CPU operations that don’t have latency sensitivity are good things to move to the cloud. Non-player-character AI is a great thing to move to the cloud because the client can just as easily interpret that data while not hogging local resources.”

We asked Bruno if this meant that Xbox Live Compute could eventually start handling more visual data if Internet latency is less of an issue in the future, but he didn’t have an answer.

“I’m probably not the guy to answer that,” he said. “I’m largely focused on CPU, but I’m interested to see how things evolve between CPU and GPU over the next several years.”

Bruno would say one thing on the topic.

“I believe we’re going to do more [with Xbox One’s visuals] in the longer term because of the way the server technology is evolving,” he said. “I think we will see more operations shifted remotely as connection speeds get better and as CPUs in the cloud get even bigger. You’re naturally going to see more longevity out of the box.”