My apologies, I misspoke by writing too quickly: custom blades, dedicated servers.
Perhaps not yet, if this is an on-going discussion, it's sure to be soured by the ABK merger - unless Sony is using it as leverage for their terms on Azure.
If you look back at what both companies said, it was nothing more than a MOU on collaboration for cloud and AI, which is really difficult to pin down as something being tangibly delivered. It wouldn't surprise me if this resulted in nothing more than PlayStation servers being installed in Microsoft's Azure global datcentres. I.e. not running on Azure, but use hosted in Azure's infrastructure like xCloud.
No, it's definitely not. Azure, like AWS and Google's server services, is really flexible. But there is nothing in any of these that are videogame-specific.
those are too big. I am anti too big companies. The only one I like is Microsoft. But the world is not well distributed. Tech companies are the future world "dominators" if we don't stop that, specially those that use our data as the product.
Inside the War on Apple and Google App Stores
Apple's and Google's app stores are facing harsh criticism by businesses saying the tech giants are iron-fisted monopolies.variety.com
PSN is hosted on AWS, certainly voice chat and multiplayer.
I meant limited to how they are being used in the game space. You honestly thought I thought MS's massive Azure network wasn't equal to AWS and Google??
AMD/ATI never released a a GPU in any product that I've seen that resembles Xenos in specs/features, though. It was early with unified shaders, tessellation, and it's ROPs could do 4x MSAA per cycle, no to mention the inclusion of eDRAM. Some people might want discount the eDRAM from GPU innovation, but IIRC the ROPS are located on the daughter die with the eDRAM.
Whilst I'm not familiar with ATI hardware of the era, Xenos is commonly likened to the Radeon X1800 XT in terms of features. The eDRAM implementation was cool, and was necessary due to the lack of RAM given the 360 was originally intended to have only 256Mb RAM.
I've read this on the internet before, but I think that's just because the X1800 XT was released contemporaneously with Xbox 360. Xenos has unified shaders. X1800 (and the whole R500 series) used vertex and pixel shaders. Unified shaders weren't available in ATI graphics cards until the HD 2000 cards (R600), and they weren't released until 2007. 18+ months after Xbox 360, with a different amount of shaders, ROPs, etc. Beyond that, from memory, the X1800 XT had 16 ROPS that I think could only do 2x MSAA per cycle while Xenos has 8 ROPS with 4x MSAA per cycle, and had some Z only optimizations that could use MSAA samples as Z only. Not to mention that the ROPs aren't even on the same die on Xenos. They are pretty different.
Believe it or not the Xenos is closer to the Adreno 200 series (based on the AMD Z430 IP) than any PC AMD GPUs going by open source driver code. The only commonality that Xenos shared with AMD GPUs in general at the time were PM4 packets (used for command processor to interface with fixed function units and programmable shaders which is still used on modern AMD GPUs today) and their VLIW ISA design ...
Microsoft wouldn't make a new modern Call of Duty game run on on local hardware, not unless significantly more capable new hardware is around the corner. More likely, Microsoft would plan to provide games via cloud streaming just like a bunch of other games.
Microsoft's strategy does look to be ignore all concerns other than Sony banging on about Call of Duty.
It also appears to be working, to some extent at least regards the public discourse where commenters are talking about Sony being awkward etc. based purely on COD. As far as The Internet is concerned, COD is all any of this is about. It really should be held behind closed doors; none of this public fighting between organisations should be happening. The official regulators should operate as unprejudiced, logical professionals and The Public should butt out until a decisions is reached. Score one more significant negative for The Internet.
