GRcade

Hime wrote:

Photek wrote:It’s possible I suppose. I presume games in Extenal HD will work or at least require a small patch. Also with Xcloud you can play a game while waiting for it to download in Gamepass.

That's the actual use case I see for streaming. Playing on your phone or whatever is nice but being able to get a stream going while the game downloads is a real quality of life improvement.

KK wrote:Maybe Sony and Microsoft are going to sell more than one version with different SSD sizes at launch.

I hope they do, anyway.

Gwertzman: You were talking about machine learning and content generation. I think that’s going to be interesting. One of the studios inside Microsoft has been experimenting with using ML models for asset generation. It’s working scarily well. To the point where we’re looking at shipping really low-res textures and having ML models uprez the textures in real time. You can’t tell the difference between the hand-authored high-res texture and the machine-scaled-up low-res texture, to the point that you may as well ship the low-res texture and let the machine do it.

Journalist: Can you do that on the hardware without install time?

Gwertzman: Not even install time. Run time.

Journalist: To clarify, you’re talking about real time, moving around the 3D space, level of detail style?

Gwertzman: Like literally not having to ship massive 2K by 2K textures. You can ship tiny textures.

Journalist: Are you saying they’re generated on the fly as you move around the scene, or they’re generated ahead of time?

Gwertzman: The textures are being uprezzed in real time.

Journalist: So you can fit on one blu-ray.

Gwertzman: The download is way smaller, but there’s no appreciable difference in game quality. Think of it more like a magical compression technology. That’s really magical. It takes a huge R&D budget. I look at things like that and say — either this is the next hard thing to compete on, hiring data scientists for a game studio, or it’s a product opportunity. We could be providing technologies like this to everyone to level the playing field again.

Journalist: Where does the source data set for that come from? Do you take every texture from every game that ships under Microsoft Game Studios?

Gwertzman: In this case, it only works by training the models on very specific sets. One genre of game. There’s no universal texture map. That would be kind of magical. It’s more like, if you train it on specific textures and then you — it works with those, but it wouldn’t work with a whole different set.

Journalist: So you still need an artist to create the original set.

Journalist: Are there any legal considerations around what you feed into the model?

Gwertzman: It’s especially good for photorealism, because that adds tons of data. It may not work so well for a fantasy art style. But my point is that I think the fact that that’s a technology now — game development has always been hard in terms of the sheer number of disciplines you have to master. Art, physics, geography, UI, psychology, operant conditioning. All these things we have to master. Then we add backend services and latency and multiplayer, and that’s hard enough. Then we added microtransactions and economy management and running your own retail store inside your game. Now we’re adding data science and machine learning. The barrier seems to be getting higher and higher.

That’s where I come in. At heart, Microsoft is a productivity company. Our employee badge says on the back, the company mission is to help people achieve more. How do we help developers achieve more? That’s what we’re trying to figure out.

Xbox Series X: Phil Spencer Says "Tons" Of Backwards Compatible Games Working Already

"Relative to the Xbox One--the first codename for that was Durango back in the original days--we are so far ahead in terms of when we have take home [consoles] and this thing being in the home," Spencer explained. "That's why I tweeted it out, because the team has just done such incredible work to get us into a position where this far ahead of launch we're actually at home and I can actually use it as a primary console"

"It's obviously quite a bit faster than the Xbox One," added Spencer when referring to the Series X's UI. "And even sometimes when things run a little bit faster there's some UI things that you need to be aware of."

On top of standard usage, Spencer explained that he's part of the process in compiling a list of games currently compatible with the Series X. It's expected to play all Xbox One titles as well as its supported list of Xbox 360 games, so part of Spencer's testing is booting up numerous different ones and seeing if they currently work. Considering anyone can see what he's currently playing, it's easy to tell which have passed the test.

"I'm trying it. It's in active development, sometimes it reboots. Not all the games today are completely compatible. We're working through our list of approved games on it. You can see what I'm playing; there's tons of games that work," Spencer said.

Even in this early state, Spencer allude to some performance enhancements that the Xbox Series X shows purely because of the hardware it's using. Loading times, for example, will be immediately affected by its use of SSD technology--something which doesn't need work to show its benefits.

"If I load a little faster into my Destiny strike than you, that's maybe my box," Spencer adding jokingly.

The Xbox Series X is expected to launch later this year, with Microsoft already confirming that it won't have strict exclusives for the foreseeable future

more heat than light wrote:Yeah, but what about Kinect games?

:capnscotty: