Microsoft Xbox Reveal Event - May 21, 2013

[ZeroEx]

I think it will be full installs, but the OS will back up the contents to the cloud and free up space when necessary. It's reasonable to assume that most games will be playable with a minimum base install size, something like 2 to 5GB, of which you can keep hundreds on the HDD locally. Then whatever you start to play will automatically re-download the erased parts from the cloud in the background.

I think full install as well. But partial installs when you're playing the game so that you don't have to wait until the game is fully installed to start playing. This will work well online and offline.

Maybe the system (depending on how games developers make their games) can erase portions of the game that you don't play over time, to free up HDD space.

 

[Kb-Smoker]

Yeah, I heard that too..

I don't know about all this, I find it incredible if the One is 33-50% less powerful then PS4, I get the sense they've really got more of a custom architecture then we know about, but that's getting into special sauce territory..

Be good to get some developer feedback (in time)..

Starting to sound like a wiiu thread.

We have pretty much all the leak information we could want on these systems.

 

[Wynix]

Definitely fully installed, you can throw the disc away once you're done.

You might want to hold onto them:
http://www.computerandvideogames.com/407912/microsoft-confirms-pre-owned-fee-for-xbox-one/

 

[Scott_Arm]

You don't even need that, the cloud backup may be content agnostic completely. Dynamically allocate space to subscribers like Google Drive or whatever.
....

But why bother uploading your game data when you could just download the part you're missing from the store?

 

[Laa-Yosh]

People have caps, even in the US.

This is for the next decade, remember. Bandwidth caps are going to disappear eventually.
Besides, people's gaming habits are something you can track and analyze with Live so Ms has a lot of statistics.

Perhaps you overestimate the actual traffic necessary? The system will only have to delete stuff when you're running out of free space and with an 500GB HDD and half of that reserved for videos and images and such, that still means you'd have to play more than 5 games concurrently, all the time.

It can work already, and will work pretty well 5 years from now, IMHO. 500 gigs will be enough with cloud storage and Live.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

Maybe the system (depending on how games developers make their games) can erase portions of the game that you don't play over time, to free up HDD space.

Yes, that's what I'm saying. Once you run out of HDD space the system will erase the extra parts of the game you played least recently. If you decide to load it up again there'll be the base install to start, and it'll re-download in the background.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

But why bother uploading your game data when you could just download the part you're missing from the store?

Maybe that won't be necessary; but the storage should work for user videos and other stuff too. It could make sense to build a content agnostic system - we'd need to see statistics and other data to decide...

 

[Brad Grenz]

Yes, it actually can. Gaikai manage a usable latency system _including_ cloud compute and cloud rendering and video encoding. So why, somehow, can you not manage it when you leave out two of those things? The round trip time on a fiber or cable network for one hop (which they specifically mentioned) is well within a single frame time. I'm getting an average of 11 ms here (from my laptop on wifi to the local Comcast Burien node - and Burien is where a huge data center is).
Min 10, Max 13, Avg 11

That's weird, cause we've been hearing for years what a bottleneck the PCI-Express bus is to using GPU compute for meaningful simulation in games, but apparently my 10Mbps DSL can do it better? Who cares what your ping times are, what about the time it takes to prepare and transfer all the relevant local data, and receive all the relevant cloud computed results? How long does it take to reintegrate that information into the local simulation and how long does the game have to wait before it can start to even render the next frame? We've seen what happened with Sim City and how all the vaunted server side simulations turned out to be smoke and mirrors. We've seen how simplistic and static MMOs have to be. Surely we'll see "world at war" meta game features, or server side loot tables and things of that nature, but the idea that cloud computing "makes your Xbox more powerful" is a fantasy.

 

[pjbliverpool]

So does it record TV or just allow me to switch channels with my voice? I wonder how it interfaces with the likes of SkyHD + as that's pretty superb as it is already IMO. Could we just be talking about a voice controlled 'skin' for the existing SkyHD + guide and planner? Or would it not even go that far? I'm very dubious at the moment. The interface does look cool - expecially Skype integration but I'm no longer convinced enough for a day 1 purchase.

Showing a bit more of the next generation Kinect could have swayed me more.

 

[Lightman]

For people speculating about GDDR5 memory in XBOX ONE:
high res. picture of board from WIRED clearly shows Micron DDR3 2133MHz chips.

Only magic to get that 200GB/s+ figure given during technical talk is either creative math to get there or higher clocked ESRAM on chip.

 

[Laa-Yosh]

That's weird, cause we've been hearing for years what a bottleneck the PCI-Express bus is to using GPU compute for meaningful simulation in games, but apparently my 10Mbps DSL can do it better?

You can keep the necessary data duplicated on the cloud by the developer. Upload the game levels, meshes, textures etc. and even update them.

 

[blakjedi]

For people speculating about GDDR5 memory in XBOX ONE:
high res. picture of board from WIRED clearly shows Micron DDR3 2133MHz chips.

Only magic to get that 200GB/s+ figure given during technical talk is either creative math to get there or higher clocked ESRAM on chip.

its the math

 

[bkilian]

That's weird, cause we've been hearing for years what a bottleneck the PCI-Express bus is to using GPU compute for meaningful simulation in games, but apparently my 10Mbps DSL can do it better? Who cares what your ping times are, what about the time it takes to prepare and transfer all the relevant local data, and receive all the relevant cloud computed results? How long does it take to reintegrate that information into the local simulation and how long does the game have to wait before it can start to even render the next frame? We've seen what happened with Sim City and how all the vaunted server side simulations turned out to be smoke and mirrors. We've seen how simplistic and static MMOs have to be. Surely we'll see "world at war" meta game features, or server side loot tables and things of that nature, but the idea that cloud computing "makes your Xbox more powerful" is a fantasy.

Believe what you like, Brad. Unfortunately for your worldview, I've actually seen it working.

 

[Accord1999]

You can keep the necessary data duplicated on the cloud by the developer. Upload the game levels, meshes, textures etc. and even update them.

But that still doesn't improve the roughly million times worse latency compared to PCI-e on PC.

 

[(((interference)))]

interference's source(s), seem to have been pretty spot on. Kudos to you, good sir. Now, have them tell you price; specs on the trigger haptic feedback; and details about Live.

Oh, why thank you sir

I don't think they'd know about the other stuff unfortunately.

 

[Jwm]

Can we estimate the size based on the slot opening for the BD?

It is 2.25 controllers tall, so roughly 13.5" based on current controller sizes.

This actually would mean that it would not fit in my custom built entertainment center or my computer desk. Darn it..I based both of them off the old 360 model when I built them.

Another thing I am curious about is the Kinect cable, how easy will I be able to extend this to work with my projector setup. Currently my Kinect is just tucked away used for VC only.

 

[Gradthrawn]

But that still doesn't improve the roughly million times worse latency compared to PCI-e on PC.

They made a very clear distinction during the Architectural talk about low latency and high latency tasks, and that the Cloud resources could be used for the latter. As for PCIe, I do believe the generally noted issue is bandwidth more so than latency. Which would mean offloading tasks whose output is of reasonable size (for WANs) and not particularly latency sensitive. The scope of such work loads should gradually increase as time and infrastructure improves (hence their "your console gets stronger over time" comment).

EDIT

Also I should clarify that I'm not sure how the focus shifted to GPGPU tasks that would go over the PCIe bus. They just simply said offloading compute tasks to the cloud. Such tasks may or may not even involve the GPU were the cloud not there.

 

[3dilettante]

They made a very clear distinction during the Architectural talk about low latency and high latency tasks, and that the Cloud resources could be used for that latter. As for PCIe, I do believe the general touted issue is bandwidth more so than latency.

For calculations with sufficient bandwidth, PCIe can be insufficient.
For other tasks, it is the latency, particularly with a PC and the drivers for the device.
GPGPU transfer latencies over PCIe are all over the place.

 

[Brad Grenz]

So does it record TV or just allow me to switch channels with my voice? I wonder how it interfaces with the likes of SkyHD + as that's pretty superb as it is already IMO. Could we just be talking about a voice controlled 'skin' for the existing SkyHD + guide and planner? Or would it not even go that far? I'm very dubious at the moment. The interface does look cool - expecially Skype integration but I'm no longer convinced enough for a day 1 purchase.

Showing a bit more of the next generation Kinect could have swayed me more.

It doesn't record TV. All that appears to be accomplished using the HDMI passthrough, so any recording capabilities would be dependent on the TV box you have. When you tell Xbox to change the channel the Xbox just passes the command along to your DVR or tuner.

 

[french toast]

Believe what you like, Brad. Unfortunately for your worldview, I've actually seen it working.

What you mean you have seen xbox one do this or just seen the technology demoed in a general sense?

Also this article on IGN clearly mentions xbox one being able to output 4k..
http://m.uk.ign.com/wikis/xbox-one/PS4_vs._Xbox_One_Comparison_Chart

Of course I'm not naive enough to think 1.2tf gpu is going to conjure up 4k gaming, but if not that then just what is it in there for? Video? Typo? :/