See just how big of an impact the cloud computer system can have

Apr 4, 2014 17:46 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft has just revealed an actual technical demonstration of its much-hyped cloud processing system, showing how a game can benefit from using the power of the online cloud to handle complex calculations instead of just stressing the local CPU and GPU and lowering the framerate to a crawl.

Ever since the Xbox One was revealed to the world last year, Microsoft opted more to focus not on the console's hardware but on the opportunities provided by the cloud, as games could run on the actual device but offload calculations and complex mechanics to the cloud, so that it's not limited by the power of that single device.

Since then, a few games have used this option, including Forza Motorsport 5 with its Drivatar system, or Titanfall, which let the cloud handle the AI behavior of non-playable characters like Grunts or Spectres.

Now, in order to accurately show off just how important the cloud compute function can be, Microsoft held a brief presentation at its ongoing BUILD conference about this feature.

As you can see in the video below, Microsoft's representatives have set up a special technical demonstration that shows a building being bombarded and demolished in real time.

One demo was running on a "high end PC" according to Microsoft, but its specs were never revealed, so it's unclear just how powerful it was. The other demo was on a regular PC connected to the cloud, which was in turn described as a "collection of devices."

Once the bombardment and destruction started, the high end PC started experiencing a massive decrease in framerate while the cloud-connected computer just kept on going without any lowering of performance.

This quick demonstration, according to Microsoft shows just how big of a difference the cloud can make in such a scenario.

"What we really think is that the power of the cloud enables new kinds of experiences that have never been possible. Even if we had multiple high end machines, they couldn’t do the kind of bandwidth that we’re doing," one of the representatives said. "What’s happening is the computation are going on in the cloud, we’re sending those rotations and the positional information down to the clients where the rendering is getting done."

Overall, the demonstration does look pretty good but it's going to be interesting to see just what games can take advantage of it, as you need to be online in order to actually use the cloud.