Microsoft has published a paper hinting that the company will use its expertise in cloud applications to change the history of gaming.
The report talks about a project called DeLorean described as "speculative execution engine." This project will make it easy to deliver large bits of gameplay over cloud services. In April, Microsoft discussed how other gaming companies have been using the Azure cloud platform to improve gameplay and graphics.
According to Techcrunch, users who tested DeLorean were unable to tell the difference between playing games such as Fable 3 and Doom 3. Both games are action-packed games and DeLorean delivered with 250 milliseconds of latency.
"We demonstrated DeLorean on Doom 3, a twitch-based first person shooter, and Fable 3, an action roleplaying game because they belong to popular game genres with demanding response times. This leads us to be optimistic about the work of applying DeLorean to other genres," Microsoft wrote.
Microsoft explained that the secret to DeLorean's performance is the inclusion of the speculative descriptor. Unlike regular videos, a video game cannot be buffered from start to finish because the player decides the next steps. However, by analyzing previous games and sampling a few of the gamer's move, Microsoft developed a way of predicting the user's next move, allowing the cloud application to send the next few frames ahead of time.
The paper stated that DeLorean combined state space subsampling, time shifting, misprediction compensation, bandwidth compression, and future input prediction for the technology.
Although it sounds really exciting, the problem with this speculative gaming console is that it will consume too much bandwidth. A DeLorean-fueled game could consume 1.5-4.5 times higher bandwidth than a game which feeds on the frames that the game knows so far, not based on the player's current input and the application's prediction.
This means that if ever DeLorean will hit the market, those who want to play their games without the lag should get a faster Internet connection.
