Project xCloud - Microsoft's Game Streaming Platform

[kaelleria]

Yesterday at GDC we got a little bit more information about xCloud.

Here's a little video by one of the journalists I follow who's scooped quite a few Microsoft and Xbox related things (Elite Controller, Halo Infinite, Xbox Maverick, etc..)



TLDW - All current Xbox Games will work in xCloud with no additional developer code on any device. Devs can also add different control layouts with very minimal effort. Next Gen games will all be using

Additionally Devs can do things like location based matchmaking, dynamic control schemes, use native touch controls on glass (pinch to zoom, etc..), have additional save states based on session length, etc...

The SDK is in testing now and will be released widely shortly. Hardware is already being installed in datacenters.

Regarding latency and bandwidth
In another article by Eurogamer, https://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2...ains-substance, bandwidth requirements for xCloud are going to be far lower than Stadia. Most of the demos so far have been done with 9-10 mb/s connections for a 1080p stream. Combined with some fancy stuff Microsoft research has been doing since 2015, Kahawai, they should be able to get the bandwidth requirements down to 5-6 mb/s. That particular project also allows some offline play in case of network hiccups

Project Kahawai information -
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/rese...g-gpu-offload/

They have also mentioned they've gotten the additional overhead in regards to latency down to under 10 ms. What this means is total latency in most cases is under the latency of the bluetooth stack.

Additionally, they've been working on the latency issue with a research project called Project Delorean - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/...ing-tolerable/

Basically using predictive modeling they were make double blind testers not notice any difference up to 256 ms.

Pricing and Availability
Again in the Eurogamer article, their first target is Android phones, but they'd like to expand to other OSs and devices, including the Switch.
Public testing will begin sometime in 2019. My bet is shortly after E3.

Pricing is probably going to be tied into Games Pass.

This is more or less the information we have today. We will be hearing more at E3.

This is not meant to replace a console, and Microsoft doesn't believe it will, but it's meant to get gaming to more people.

[kaelleria]

XCloud has entered employee take home testing with signs pointing to a real world demo available at E3.

https://twitter.com/XboxP3/status/1123381636370845696

Congrats to Project xCloud team for completing their takehome release. Excited to get feedback from our internal teams ahead of public trials later this year.

https://www.thurrott.com/xbox/205963...-new-milestone

One thing I have heard was that for E3, Microsoft wanted to have a demo of the service outside of E3. Specifically, they wanted to demonstrate xCloud running from someone’s house and not on-stage, where the demo would look scripted like the previous demos. I don’t know if this segment is still being planned for E3 but the Take Home milestone would play into that narrative.

With E3 a little over a month away, Microsoft is preparing to talk about its next-generation consoles and strategy at a deeper level. I expect that we will hear about some of the specs of the next generation consoles and will also learn more about the strategy the company will use to launch its next-generation devices at their keynote on June 9th.

[kaelleria]

Some new information has come out directly from Microsoft in regards to the developer requirements to stream on xCloud. They confirm what I've been hearing.

In short there are none. There are 3500 games that already exist that will work with xCloud with no changes. Any updates done via the normal patching mechanism will be automatically applied to any game running on xCloud.

https://news.xbox.com/en-us/2019/05/...nd-developers/

Last fall, we pulled back the curtain on Project xCloud – our game-streaming technology. Our vision for Xbox is that you can play the games you want, with the people you want, on the devices you want. Project xCloud brings us closer to fully realizing that vision. Our teams around the globe have been hard at work, building out and testing the system. We recently rolled out an alpha version to Microsoft employees through our take home program and are using the feedback to make improvements, ensuring Project xCloud offers customers a great experience.

The driving purpose behind Project xCloud has been to enable playing great games anywhere, anytime. From the beginning, our aim has been seamless compatibility. We want to make it as easy as possible for developers to make their games available to all gamers with support for existing games, those currently in development, and future games.

The power of Project xCloud – the seamless compatibility for developers and the new places to play for gamers – comes from Azure datacenters spanning the globe, with hardware that shares a common set of components with our Xbox consoles. We’ve already deployed our custom Project xCloud blades to datacenters across 13 Azure regions with an initial emphasis on proximity to key game development centers in North America, Asia and Europe. Leading global development teams such as Capcom and Paradox Interactive now have the ability to easily test their games directly from Project xCloud without having to port to a new platform. This is just the beginning of our buildout, with our ultimate goal of supporting gamers in Azure regions around the world.

Today you can play three generations of amazing games on Xbox One. That means that Project xCloud has the technical capability to stream more than 3,500 games, without any changes or modifications required by a developer. In other words, developers will be able to dramatically scale their existing games across devices, with no additional development, no additional code base maintenance and no separate updates. When a developer updates the Xbox One version of their title, those updates will also apply to all versions available on Project xCloud without any additional work.

There are currently more than 1,900 games in development for Xbox One, all of which could run on Project xCloud. Developers creating those games continue working normally – building with the tools they have – while we do the work to make their games accessible to the broadest set of players possible.

We also recently added enhancements to our standard Xbox Developer Kit (XDK) to add support for streaming. One API we’re excited about is the new “IsStreaming” API which allows any game to know if it’s streaming from the cloud. Games can then cue features and functionality to enhance the streaming experience; for instance, adjusting font sizes for smaller displays or hosting multiplayer matches on a single server to reduce latency. We’ll continue to look for ways to empower developers to tailor their games for the many ways their customers play.

Project xCloud is an exciting journey that we are all on together. We can’t wait to invite the community to provide feedback, help us shape it and participate in development in a very open and transparent way. Stay tuned…

This gives xCloud a huge leg up over Stadia. I'm not 100% clear on dev modifications are needed for PSNow, but it sounds like xCloud is going to come out of the gate swinging.

[Vash The Stampede]

Sigh, cloud gaming will never work. The speed of light is a thing. Latency isn't a bandwidth issue but a distance issue. By lowering the bandwidth requirement all Microsoft did was lower the image quality through compression. You can't get latency faster than a Bluetooth connection connection because physics. It's physically impossible.

Just ignore cloud gaming and let it die. The strategy with cloud gaming is what they perceive as tolerable, meaning what they can get away with before you rage quit throwing your controller at the ground breaking it. Notice no pricing information yet because it won't be cheap.

[Onikaroshi]

Sigh, cloud gaming will never work. The speed of light is a thing. Latency isn't a bandwidth issue but a distance issue. By lowering the bandwidth requirement all Microsoft did was lower the image quality through compression. You can't get latency faster than a Bluetooth connection connection because physics. It's physically impossible.

Just ignore cloud gaming and let it die. The strategy with cloud gaming is what they perceive as tolerable, meaning what they can get away with before you rage quit throwing your controller at the ground breaking it. Notice no pricing information yet because it won't be cheap.

I've done cloud gaming.... It wasn't bad at all, it just depends on your location honestly.

[kaelleria]

Sigh, cloud gaming will never work. The speed of light is a thing. Latency isn't a bandwidth issue but a distance issue. By lowering the bandwidth requirement all Microsoft did was lower the image quality through compression. You can't get latency faster than a Bluetooth connection connection because physics. It's physically impossible.

Just ignore cloud gaming and let it die. The strategy with cloud gaming is what they perceive as tolerable, meaning what they can get away with before you rage quit throwing your controller at the ground breaking it. Notice no pricing information yet because it won't be cheap.

Did you bother to read any of my original comment and some of the research they've done to mitigate latency? Or the fact that MS has more data center regions than most competitors?

Streaming will never be great for twitch shooters, but it should be fine for most cases, especially with their predictive modeling.

[Vash The Stampede]

I've done cloud gaming.... It wasn't bad at all, it just depends on your location honestly.

It depends on a lot of things, but what games have you played that you found acceptable? Most of everyone I heard that tried out any of these services found that the lag was always there and noticeable.

[Onikaroshi]

It depends on a lot of things, but what games have you played that you found acceptable? Most of everyone I heard that tried out any of these services found that the lag was always there and noticeable.

PUBG back on nvidia's service, won the game, didn't feel any lag, but the server was 1.5 hrs away from me.

[kaelleria]

It depends on a lot of things, but what games have you played that you found acceptable? Most of everyone I heard that tried out any of these services found that the lag was always there and noticeable.

Read my OP and read the attached articles -

They have also mentioned they've gotten the additional overhead in regards to latency down to under 10 ms. What this means is total latency in most cases is under the latency of the bluetooth stack.

Additionally, they've been working on the latency issue with a research project called Project Delorean - https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/...ing-tolerable/

Basically using predictive modeling they were make double blind testers not notice any difference up to 256 ms.

[Vash The Stampede]

Read my OP and read the attached articles -

I did and it's marketing technobabble. That article is from 2014 by the way, so who even knows if they're using it now. You can't predict players input, unless the game is extremely simple. This article from 2010 shows that Microsoft killed cross-platform with PC because console gamers were getting "wrecked". So M+KB was a problem but not latency? You can't magic fix latency because law of physics. Also don't believe everything Microsoft tells you either. Of course Microsoft is going to tell you that they have this technology that uses AI running on a quantum computer that can somehow bypass the speed of light. The speed of light is absolute, so says Einstein.

PUBG back on nvidia's service, won the game, didn't feel any lag, but the server was 1.5 hrs away from me.

PUBG with a mouse and keyboard? Cause you're going to feel that 1.5 hours distance with a mouse.

[Onikaroshi]

I did and it's marketing technobabble. That article is from 2014 by the way, so who even knows if they're using it now. You can't predict players input, unless the game is extremely simple. This article from 2010 shows that Microsoft killed cross-platform with PC because console gamers were getting "wrecked". So M+KB was a problem but not latency? You can't magic fix latency because law of physics. Also don't believe everything Microsoft tells you either. Of course Microsoft is going to tell you that they have this technology that uses AI running on a quantum computer that can somehow bypass the speed of light. The speed of light is absolute, so says Einstein.


PUBG with a mouse and keyboard? Cause you're going to feel that 1.5 hours distance with a mouse.

Mouse and keyboard, no lag, it was as smooth as playing on my pc.

[kaelleria]

I did and it's marketing technobabble. That article is from 2014 by the way, so who even knows if they're using it now. You can't predict players input, unless the game is extremely simple. This article from 2010 shows that Microsoft killed cross-platform with PC because console gamers were getting "wrecked". So M+KB was a problem but not latency? You can't magic fix latency because law of physics. Also don't believe everything Microsoft tells you either. Of course Microsoft is going to tell you that they have this technology that uses AI running on a quantum computer that can somehow bypass the speed of light. The speed of light is absolute, so says Einstein.

Ok so this is going to be hard for you to understand I know, but there is latency with any piece or hardware. When they say they've gotten the response time under 10 ms... that means the response time is less than any latency you'd normally have with a bluetooth controller and no one will notice the difference.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at in regards to M+KB vs controller. It has no bearing on the latency discussion.

Different regions will have different latency and streaming won't be for everyone, but they've clearly been working on the issue.

Please point out the marketing technobabble in that article.

As I've said in any thread related to game streaming, YMMV. If you're fine on a PC or console, fine, continue playing on it. This streaming push isn't just about current gamers, but also gamers that don't own hardware. Consoles aren't going away, but they could for some.

[Vash The Stampede]

Ok so this is going to be hard for you to understand I know, but there is latency with any piece or hardware. When they say they've gotten the response time under 10 ms... that means the response time is less than any latency you'd normally have with a bluetooth controller and no one will notice the difference.

I know this is going to be hard for you to understand but what if I told you that's bullshit? You can even measure your latency with a ping tool and everything is above 10 ms when it comes to websites. Also ping is not isolated as you're always adding latency not isolating it. If the repsonse time is 10 ms then that's on top of wifi, bluetooth, and the TV screen. But more importantly it's also on top of the internet latency you experience.

I'm not sure I understand what you're getting at in regards to M+KB vs controller. It has no bearing on the latency discussion.

If you've ever used a mouse in a first person shooter then you'd understand where you look depends on latency heavily. A gamepad analogy stick is different since the input is inherently inaccurate and won't be as noticeable. That's how I know @Onikaroshi works for Nvidia when he claims it works as smoothly as a PC. Consider VR is impossible for cloud gaming for the same reason. Head tracking would be past tense. No amount of Microsoft predictive technobabble will fix this.

Different regions will have different latency and streaming won't be for everyone, but they've clearly been working on the issue.

It's called build the servers closer to populated areas. If you're not in a densely populated area then this won't work well for you.

Please point out the marketing technobabble in that article.

Where do I start? Comparing it to bluetooth latency? Project Delorean with predictive button input? Getting bandwidth requirements down to 5-6 mb/s, without mentioning image quality, because compression always removes detail to get lower bandwidth requirements. The whole article is built for people who believed in Sega's Blast Processing.

As I've said in any thread related to game streaming, YMMV. If you're fine on a PC or console, fine, continue playing on it. This streaming push isn't just about current gamers, but also gamers that don't own hardware. Consoles aren't going away, but they could for some.

And as I've said in any thread I've posted in is that cloud gaming will never take off. How's Sony's and Nvidia's services doing? Owning hardware will always be cheaper than paying a monthly fee for using someone else's computer some place else with latency and lower image quality.

[Onikaroshi]

Ah yes, I totally work for nvidia.... is there any point in arguing with you? Your mind is made up even though I know it worked perfectly fine.

[kaelleria]

Ah yes, I totally work for nvidia.... is there any point in arguing with you? Your mind is made up even though I know it worked perfectly fine.

There isn't. His mind is made up. He didn't bother to read anything I wrote or read the attached documentation. It's like some people in the politics subforum.

It's almost like he's ignoring the fact that this isn't traditional thin client streaming.

[kaelleria]

xCloud Public Beta sign ups have started. Testing should start sometime next month.
https://www.xbox.com/en-US/xbox-game-streaming

Open to people in the US, UK and South Korea. You need an Android 6 phone or higher and a bluetooth compatible controller for these initial tests. It currently is not open to iOS users.

Both wireless and cellular networks are allowed.

Games available for testing are Sea of Thieves, Halo 5 and Gears 5. You do not need to be a GamePass member to be selected. Initial beta invites will be done by lottery and will increase in number of invites as time goes on.

[Vash The Stampede]

About to be as successful as Google Stadia.

[Tech614]

About to be as successful as Google Stadia.

It will be a lot more successful then that since it's tied to services and hardware people already use and sub to. xCloud isn't a replacement to the home console or gaming PC it's a compliment to it. Big difference between it and stadia.

[PACOX]

Cloud streaming can work. The US just has ass internet, Europe and OCX via proxy.

ISP routers are shitty. Infrastructure in most areas is ancient with no real incentives to improve. No one wants to front the cost of dedicated servers.

[paralleluniverse]

Only for Android devices, not for PC currently.

Can't use it without a Xbox Pass subscription, where you can only play games on the subscription catalogue, or a owning a physical Xbox.

The tech is promising, the way they're hamstringing it is nonsense.