14 DAY TRIAL // The development team in charge of the Xbox One at Microsoft has not been talking about a streaming option for video games, similar to the coming PlayStation Now for the PlayStation 4, but it does seem that a small team of researchers is working on a solution designed to limit potential latency for such a service.
A research paper written by Kyungmin Lee, David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo, Johannes Kopf, Sergey Grizan, Alec Wolman and Jason Flinn, talks about a system cleverly named DeLorean, which can be used to mask up to 250 milliseconds of network-based latency.
The full details about the technical concept are not included in the summary offered by the company, but it claims that “DeLorean produces speculative rendered frames of future possible outcomes, delivering them to the client one entire RTT ahead of time; clients perceive no latency. To achieve this, DeLorean combines: 1) future input prediction; 2) state space subsampling and time shifting; 3) misprediction compensation; and 4) bandwidth compression.”
It seems that Microsoft has used both Doom 3 and Fable 3 in order to test the performance of their system.
The researchers add, “Through user studies and performance benchmarks, we find that players overwhelmingly prefer DeLorean to traditional thin-client gaming where the network RTT is fully visible, and that DeLorean successfully mimics playing across a low-latency network.”
Streaming is an interesting solution for video game companies because it allows them to rent games to players rather than sell them, which might mean more profits in the long term and better ways to create content that is tailored to their needs.
At the moment, Sony is getting ready to launch PlayStation Now for the PS4, which will also be expanded to cover the Vita, the PS3 and even a number of television sets, and the system is designed to make latency impossible to notice as long as the user has a solid Internet connection.
Microsoft has not said that it is interested in something similar, but it needs to maintain feature parity for the Xbox One, and that means they might make an official announcement which involved DeLorean at some point in the near future.
Currently, the home console is lagging behind in terms of sales when compared to the PS4, which has managed to deliver 10 million units to gamers all over the world, and the coming Christmas shopping season is crucial for the future of the platform.