Predict: The Next Generation Console Tech

[eastmen]

OK let me explain why I think cloud storage has more advantages over digital download.

1. Obviously, you eliminate the need for large local storage and necessity of maintenance of the storage.

Are these costs high vs cloud storage ?

2. Console manufacturers will lose the additional revenue from the storage peripherals but the solution is definitely cheaper for the end user. This decreases the entry price of the console significantly.

I don't think the entry price will decrease at all. To even get close to todays console's image quality you need quite a capable pc and even then onlive looks worse

3. No physical limit for user. Eliminates the need to uninstall games before new purchases. This may be of concern in a full digital download based system considering that next generation of consoles will not be launched with multi terabyte local storage.

Who's considering that . We already have 250 gig hardrives in current gen consoles. A system designed for full DD will obviously go with 3.5inch drives in which as I've stated the end user has acess to 2 TBs for $100 bucks or close to that in 2010 most likely 2 years before any such system releases. 2TB allows for 80 games at 25GB a game. That is far more than the average person will buy in a console cycle and of course non played games can be deleted and redownloaded at a future date if the need be.

4. It makes sense if you don't want to hand the game completely to the end user. Digital download dissolves the renting/used games market but it does not solve the piracy completely. With cloud storage there is nothing to steal/copy/share etc.

But if DD introduces its own problems due to the quality of internet then surely Cloud storage will not only share many of those but introduce much worse. We have been debating download caps but what happens when all the game info is streamed. It will quickly hit the cap when you streaming 2mbit streams of the game constantly for hours at a time vs simply downloading the game once. Not to mention what happens when more people come onto your cable node or even onto your modem in your house. The game experiance will greatly decrease. Then what about those who's console will use wifi , you'll have an even worse experiance. How about leaving the house. Sure its not portable but many people will bring systems to their summer homes or on vactation or to a friends house .

5. How long do you think it would take to download a full next generation game? Don't you think you will need bandwith to shorten the download time to a reasonable level? Instead, you can start playing by single click the same way you insert the disc and play.

I'd wager about 15 to 30 minutes for a next gen game. Developers will package and stream the games in the future so that the start of the game becomes playable . Off shot perhaps an hour .

What happens when your internet goes down. You may not be able to get new content on a DD only console but you simply can't play on your cloud console.

I am not arguing that next generation consoles will adapt this model completely but I predict that it will definitely happen sometime in future. The transition from download to stream has already started with music and movies and it is bound to happen for games too. The biggest question now is, how ubiquitous the high speed networks are? Are there enough people with such broad band connection? Is this population sufficient to sustain (economically) a cloud-storage based console?

I think the main diffrence right now is size and the fact that music has already gone through with the DD portion already.

With music for myself it takes about 5 seconds to download a song (perhaps less) it takes 3-5 minutes to play it back so there for bandwidth doesn't matter at all. Figuring every song at 3 minutes you will need 20 songs an hour. figuring 5megs per song your at 100 megs an hour. 2,400 megs a day. Higher quality movies still use DD . There are few 1080p streaming choices and those that exist like zune cache heavy portions of the movie

Maybe next generation consoles will be somewhere in between and accommodate all kinds of distribution systems (physical media/digital download/ cloud storage).

I think cloud is out for anything but the simpilest arcade games and at that point it may be smarter to simply download the game tobegin with.

 

[liolio]

I am not sure but as far as I know, DVD drive that Xbox360 games are run from, have around 15 MB/s bandwith and 100ms latency. That is comparable to a typical cable network latency. Besides, I am not suggesting that the DVD drive should be replaced by the internet connection alone. Network plus a limited local storage which can be used to buffer game data on the run can replace the need for optical media. Game levels can be temporarily installed in this local storage to overcome latency and bandwith issues together. Cloud computing has so many advantages on physical media, distribution, DRM, price, ease of use for the end user etc. that for me it sounds very promising.

you leave in a wonderful country if a lot of people have access to such high speed connexions.

 

[Xenus]

2 and 3 seem weird arguments for me. The 1Tb drive is already approaching the pricing floor for HDD's and will be there by 2013. And I don't see any significant gain considering that HDD's are not that significantly more expensive than disk drives and the added benefit that people can use them to store media and make it the all in one media box Sony and Microsoft desire.

5. Seem like it would be significantly easier to manage then the could storage issues all you need to allow is game playing before complete download. Take the old multi-cd games for instance I don't need disk 2 3 or 4 to play the beginning of the game. DD could segment this down even further so with 15 mins you could be playing the game while the rest downloads in the background.

 

[upnorthsox]

2 and 3 seem weird arguments for me. The 1Tb drive is already approaching the pricing floor for HDD's and will be there by 2013. And I don't see any significant gain considering that HDD's are not that significantly more expensive than disk drives and the added benefit that people can use them to store media and make it the all in one media box Sony and Microsoft desire.

5. Seem like it would be significantly easier to manage then the could storage issues all you need to allow is game playing before complete download. Take the old multi-cd games for instance I don't need disk 2 3 or 4 to play the beginning of the game. DD could segment this down even further so with 15 mins you could be playing the game while the rest downloads in the background.

Unless of course it's an online FPS, then you're one of the laggers on the map. And of course forget about it on release day as a million people are trying to download at once. You're right though, active cloud storage is worse.

 

[eastmen]

Unless of course it's an online FPS, then you're one of the laggers on the map. And of course forget about it on release day as a million people are trying to download at once. You're right though, active cloud storage is worse.

I don't see that happening. steam already allows for pre loading .why wouldn't MS or Sony include one of the smarter choices of that platform ?

Reserve COD18 and start preloading 2 weeks before release !!!

I'd also expect to be at work , browse through xbox.com or ps4.com or whatever and say oh that game looks like fun , click buy and download now and when i get home my system has already downloaded half of it or all of it and i can start playing.

 

[ShadowRunner]

The only way cloud storage would work at the moment is with heavy use of proceduraly generated content, so that the textures etc are created on the user end on the fly. This is very restrictive though, i can see a few games doing it but not a whole console based on it.

The other issue is simply cost. Having a HDD may only increase the cost to the consumer by $30 and is a one off cost that is passed on to the consumer. With cloud storage the badwidth costs for the content provider across a 5 year period is going to make the $30 for a HDD a much better option to the console manufacturer.

 

[liolio]

you leave in a wonderful country if a lot of people have access to such high speed connexions.

Take two as it seems that nobody noticed the irony/sarcasm.

This discussion is messed-up if one consider 15 megabytes per second as the average bandwidth figure.

It's no where near that much in quiet some country. The best you can have in France is optic fiber which offer up to 70mb per second up and down. The only value that interests us for this discussion is the down value: best case 70mb/s ie 8.78MB/s

If you assume twice as much as a standard... well console manufacturers will have to launch their product only in some Asiatic megalopolis which will somehow limit their potential user base.

 

[Blazkowicz]

I'd wager about 15 to 30 minutes for a next gen game. Developers will package and stream the games in the future so that the start of the game becomes playable . Off shot perhaps an hour .

hey why not tape. you insert a cassette of magnetic tape in the top loader, enter some loading command then press play.

 

[phenix]

It is far out it seems, with data caps and bandwith limitations. I am curious to see how MS pull it out next time if they continue to resist BluRay adaptation.

 

[V3]

Why MS have to use Bluray ? They got HD-DVD tech they can used. So it won't play Bluray movie but it's still very large capacity which is good enough for games. They could easily have two version too, one with disc drive another without. This gen been about multiple SKUs anyway.

 

[corduroygt]

Why MS have to use Bluray ? They got HD-DVD tech they can used. So it won't play Bluray movie but it's still very large capacity which is good enough for games. They could easily have two version too, one with disc drive another without. This gen been about multiple SKUs anyway.

If the next xbox has an optical drive, then it will definitely be blu-ray, there's no point of including a dead format, because it tends to be more expensive due to not enjoying the economies of scale of blu-ray. Also, having blu-ray playback on the console will improve the value proposition like it does with the PS3. Also MS doesn't have "HD DVD tech," that belongs to Toshiba. All MS has is some encoding/decoding software for their subset of AVC implementation, called VC-1, which can also be used in blu-rays or DD.

 

[cal_guy]

VC-1 is not a subset of AVC, it's a separate codec standard with many signficant differences between them. Microsoft is a major contributor to both the H.264/AVC and VC-1 patent pools.

 

[jonabbey]

Yeah, it's not like there are a lot of HD-DVD pressing plants any more.

 

[eastmen]

hey why not tape. you insert a cassette of magnetic tape in the top loader, enter some loading command then press play.

Don't know what your comment is about. It takes me at least 30 minutes to get to the store , buy the game and then get home. Thats not including having to go and preorder more popular games or having to travel store to store to find sold out games if I didn't preorder.

15mins to 1 hr is nothing to wait to play a game esp since I can do other things while it downloads like watch tv , make dinner , clean up , take a nap. When I have to physicly go out to buy a game that whole time is devoted and wasted to buying the game .

 

[manux]

VC-1 is not a subset of AVC, it's a separate codec standard with many signficant differences between them. Microsoft is a major contributor to both the H.264/AVC and VC-1 patent pools.

So what are the differences?

 

[Kaotik]

So what are the differences?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1

Should get you started

 

[manux]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_H.264_and_VC-1

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windowsmedia/howto/articles/vc1techoverview.aspx
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H.264/MPEG-4_AVC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VC-1

Should get you started

I don't get it... VC-1 looks very much like subset of h.264 high profile. I was looking for an explanation why that is not the case. So far best explanation I have found is in the link below. But when reading it one must remember amirm was an microsoft employee and doesn't give objective view. Those posts were also written during the hd-dvd vs. blu-ray war where amirm was avid vc1+hd-dvd evangelist and tried to bad mouth anything blue as much as possible

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?p=9931723&&

Edit. I'll summarize differences to those who are interested but cannot be bothered to read through amirm's post.

On highlevel both VC1 and h264 look very similar and the difference is in implementation/timing of the spec.

Amirm claims Transform block size was added as an afterthought to h264 creating incompatible h264 high profile. According to amirm these transform block size was originally only feature in VC-1 and here h264 copies VC-1. Though on another post amirm says block size was discussed while creating h264, then dimisissed and added back later on(hence not copying vc1).

Secondly loop filtering implementation is different(though it exists on both codecs). Thirdly . Interpolation filter size is different between codecs. Both of these thing can vary from implementation to implementation so I wouldn't think these really are details making the codecs hugely different.

Many of these differences seem to boil down mainly to implementation differences not so much to differences in how the codec works on high level. This is not so surprising once you find out it's the same guy who engineered VC-1 that engineered h264 (Gary Sullivan).

To me it looks like VC-1 is greatly based on highlevel to h264 but some of the specific details are optimized differently. VC-1 seems to favour things that are lighter to decode whereas h264 has been spread around to cover something from lowend to very highend(i.e. vc-1 misses CABAC).

 

[Kaotik]

They're obviously similar in features, you can throw any modern codec meant for HD video and it'll probably be quite similar, but that doesn't meant they based on each other in any way

Also, VC-1 is WMV (based) codec.

 

[Rolf N]

Take two as it seems that nobody noticed the irony/sarcasm.

This discussion is messed-up if one consider 15 megabytes per second as the average bandwidth figure.

It's no where near that much in quiet some country. The best you can have in France is optic fiber which offer up to 70mb per second up and down. The only value that interests us for this discussion is the down value: best case 70mb/s ie 8.78MB/s

If you assume twice as much as a standard... well console manufacturers will have to launch their product only in some Asiatic megalopolis which will somehow limit their potential user base.

My current line gives me 350kB/s, similar to the last, and the one prior to that. At my parents' house we only get 240kB/s effective downstream. Of course, that's with DSL products of much higher advertised speeds (6Mb/s). The length/health of the copper under the road just won't allow more to get through.

And all of these places fall into the biggest/most densely populated non-megalopolis "Landkreis" (roughly equiv to arrondissement) in Germany.

Welcome to planet earth.

 

[liolio]

My current line gives me 350kB/s, similar to the last, and the one prior to that. At my parents' house we only get 240kB/s effective downstream. Of course, that's with DSL products of much higher advertised speeds (6Mb/s). The length/health of the copper under the road just won't allow more to get through.

And all of these places fall into the biggest/most densely populated non-megalopolis "Landkreis" (roughly equiv to arrondissement) in Germany.

Welcome to planet earth.

I'm not sure I understand the tone of your post, anyway.

I was mostly reacting to phenix statement:

I am not sure but as far as I know, DVD drive that Xbox360 games are run from, have around 15 MB/s bandwith and 100ms latency. That is comparable to a typical cable network latency

Actually I realize that I miss read his post he only speaks about bandwidth.
But anyway neither latency or bandwidth are to be solve in near future especially with this fucked up economics.