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[CeeJay]

This is not completely true. Microsoft purposely planned to use "worse" chips (i.e. ones that "run hot") for the Series X cloud blades. With the additional cooling available in a datacenter, they can run the lower performing chips and increase the power (and thus the heat) to attain the same performance as the consumer units. This is not to say there will be zero conflict between demand, but significantly reduced if they had the same performance specification.

Really, do you have a link to any articles?

Cooling in data centres is extremely important, expensive and carbon positive so I wouldn't have thought they would choose to raise the temps with faulty hot chips. I'd be interested to read about this. Maybe you misunderstood?

 

[anthony2690]

I'm quite curious of people's experience with these new server blades, I probably won't try them out myself as my phone is pretty rubbish and only supports 2.4ghz Internet annotingly.
But when I upgrade, I will

 

[skit_data]

Does this mean I will be able to purchase a Xbox One SAD and play the Forza Series X games via XGPU?

 

[reksveks]

Does this mean I will be able to purchase a Xbox One SAD and play the Forza Series X games via XGPU?

In the future, yes

 

[mrBandoza]

This is great news. I will continue to wait for the big hitters next year and hopefully I can stream Starfield via my TV. Is the resolution confirmed to be 1080p on the new blades?

 

[RJMacready73]

Does this mean I can finally play Sea of Thieves with the kids on their iPads and me on a laptop?

 

[Shmunter]

Interesting. Didn’t see that coming. Such a move indicates Xcloud is aiming beyond just the mobile screen.

 

[pasterpl]

Does this mean I can finally play Sea of Thieves with the kids on their iPads and me on a laptop?

I think you can do this already.

 

[Gamezone]

I think xCloud only exists in Azures "West Europe" region right now..

That site is located in the Netherlands - That means 25-40ms latency more or less from Scandinavia right now

Hopefully they install xCloud hardware in other sites later this year (Norway East and the upcoming Sweden Central and Denmark East)

Choose the Right Azure Region for You | Microsoft Azure

On Geforce Now it's picking EU NorthWest for me who lives in Norway. I don't know how that compare to xCloud servers? The result is pretty much no noticable input lag when using a controller, even when playing on WIFI (Using WIFI 6). On xCloud it's getting better, but the input lag is still very noticable. I have of course been testing a few games with new blades.

 

[reksveks]

Does this mean I can finally play Sea of Thieves with the kids on their iPads and me on a laptop?

I think you can do this already.

The web (xbox.com/play) version might be in beta still, pretty sure it is.

 

[onesvenus]

Excuse me sir, how are you playing on a browser?

xbox.com/play

You need to be a Gamepass ultimate subscriber and it's not available to everyone because they are giving access slowly.

It's so great to be able to run games that my laptop wouldn't run any other way

 

[elliot5]

I'm quite curious of people's experience with these new server blades, I probably won't try them out myself as my phone is pretty rubbish and only supports 2.4ghz Internet annotingly.
But when I upgrade, I will

My phone supports 5ghz but my home network isn't 5ghz nor wifi 6 and it runs perfectly fine unlike before the upgraded servers.

This is great news. I will continue to wait for the big hitters next year and hopefully I can stream Starfield via my TV. Is the resolution confirmed to be 1080p on the new blades?

Idk if they've confirmed but I believe the browser is 1080p. Either way it would be hard to determine as the quality is good with no artifacting.

 

[SpokkX]

On Geforce Now it's picking EU NorthWest for me who lives in Norway. I don't know how that compare to xCloud servers? The result is pretty much no noticable input lag when using a controller, even when playing on WIFI (Using WIFI 6). On xCloud it's getting better, but the input lag is still very noticable. I have of course been testing a few games with new blades.

Cloud services is ALL about physical closeness. Speed of light and all that

Basically Geforce now "EU Northwest" --- is based in Stockholm, Sweden

Currently xCloud (Azure "West Europe" region) is in Netherlands

xCloud in scandinavia cannot compete.. it should be similar to Geforce Now on "EU Central 2" --- it is also based in Netherlands

 

[ipukespiders]

Blades are back!

 

[iHaunter]

The underlying compute hardware (and instances) for xCloud. In other words, cloud XSXs for the streaming service.

Technically server blades are just giant PCIE Cards with entire servers on them that slot into a blade server.

So Microsoft got their server XSX blades and are starting to put them in.

 

[WoodyStare]

Still a bit too inconsistent in terms of performance, and that’s with both Fios and LTE. The image quality/frame rate has gotten a lot better though.

Stadia still runs so much better, it’s too bad the support for it is nonexistent. Hopefully MS can get it to that point soon.

 

[Gamezone]

Cloud services is ALL about physical closeness. Speed of light and all that

Basically Geforce now "EU Northwest" --- is based in Stockholm, Sweden

Currently xCloud (Azure "West Europe" region) is in Netherlands

xCloud in scandinavia cannot compete.. it should be similar to Geforce Now on "EU Central 2" --- it is also based in Netherlands

That explains it. I live at the North end in Norway, so the Netherlands is pretty far away, and so is Stockholm, but it obviously makes all the difference with GeForce NOW. This is something Microsoft should fix before ending the beta, but I don't think they will.

 

[DavidGzz]

I'll try it again tonight but man, either my work internet was sucking today or the vpn I have to use to access the web browser beta is slowing things down cause wow, it was unplayable. I've used Xcloud before and it was ok, nothing like this so I'm hoping it was my setup. I played Dark Alliance and I was turning about 2 seconds after I pressed the direction.

 

[Dave_at_Home]

Blades are back!

 

[Manwithoutfear]

ok i'll have to try seige. i just played doom 2016 and my gosh the input delay was terrible. i legit looked like a polygon journalist playing, it was THAT bad! i played a little halo MCC reach and it was much better, but still would not suggest it if you have alternatives. ultimately this is really great to be able to do. in the short term i think it will be nice to be able to play a game while downloading it. in the long term i could see this being amazing.

 

[EverydayBeast]

Things like this makes me think Nintendo deserves an actual online service.

 

[elliot5]

ok i'll have to try seige. i just played doom 2016 and my gosh the input delay was terrible. i legit looked like a polygon journalist playing, it was THAT bad! i played a little halo MCC reach and it was much better, but still would not suggest it if you have alternatives. ultimately this is really great to be able to do. in the short term i think it will be nice to be able to play a game while downloading it. in the long term i could see this being amazing.

Smoothest games for me have been Yakuza LAD, Halo, Ori and Destiny 2. Maybe give those a spin (other than Halo you already tried that and it seems ok for you).

 

[Isleofsancroy]

Screw you OP, I though this was about Microsoft redesigning and bringing back blades from the 360.

 

[Manwithoutfear]

Smoothest games for me have been Yakuza LAD, Halo, Ori and Destiny 2. Maybe give those a spin (other than Halo you already tried that and it seems ok for you).

just tried siege and made sure it was on prioritize performance. was def the best of the 3 i've tried today (doom 2016/Reach/Siege). The joysticks still felt "floaty" but in a single player game or coop game i could absolutely live with that experience.

 

[elliot5]

just tried siege and made sure it was on prioritize performance. was def the best of the 3 i've tried today (doom 2016/Reach/Siege). The joysticks still felt "floaty" but in a single player game or coop game i could absolutely live with that experience.

Some games like Sea of Thieves and Siege have joystick sens AND deadzone amounts and accerelation scaling. For Siege, turning down the deadzone all the way and in SOT turning deadzone down + adjusting the curve made it more responsive.

 

[Manwithoutfear]

Some games like Sea of Thieves and Siege have joystick sens AND deadzone amounts and accerelation scaling. For Siege, turning down the deadzone all the way and in SOT turning deadzone down + adjusting the curve made it more responsive.

ok thanks for that. i did turn the acceleration down to 0 on Doom 2016 and it made it better, but was still awful. I've not messed with siege settings for input yet.

 

[FatKingBallman]

I'm quite curious of people's experience with these new server blades, I probably won't try them out myself as my phone is pretty rubbish and only supports 2.4ghz Internet annotingly.
But when I upgrade, I will

Still a bit too inconsistent in terms of performance, and that’s with both Fios and LTE. The image quality/frame rate has gotten a lot better though.

Stadia still runs so much better, it’s too bad the support for it is nonexistent. Hopefully MS can get it to that point soon.

Yea, reading on both forums. People seems to have problems with lag and image quality/graphics, even if it is directly on XSX.

I realize it’s early days, but Stadia is so much better right now. Played Destiny 2 across both. Stadia looks better - didn’t get Series X blade with Xbox but compression is very noticeable on Xbox. I get so many slow connection warnings and the game feels more laggy compared to Stadia.
But weirdly, Stadia is also much better than streaming games locally from my Series X as well. Bizarre.

It seems like Xbox is rolling out Xbox Series X server blades over at xbox.com/play for selected games

Man... wish I could get an invite to xCloud already!!! (I am GPU sub so just playing the waiting game)

www.resetera.com

Didn't expect to be worse than Stadia, though. Of course it won't come close to Nvidia cloud for a very long time.

 

[AJUMP23]

Sharpen those Blades for the console wars.

 

[elliot5]

i am very thankful ESO is on xCloud because fuck downloading this massive game for the Game Pass rewards quest to play for an hour lol

performance mode runs great on the xsx blades

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

so xcloud has streaming games running at 120fps. are there any other streaming services that offer that?

I don't think the stream itself is running at 120fps, it's just that the hardware it's running on supports 120hz, so the game allows you to enable it.

 

[Oddvintagechap]

Advantage Xbox.
Sony isnt going to use PS5 hardware for their servers anytime soon.

 

[THE DUCK]

On PC, the amount of lag I had on Chrome was worse that Edge, or at least it seemed like it was fair bit better. Kind of like went from almost unplayable to pretty good.

 

[Mr.ODST]

xCloud will always be best when I want to play a co-op or single player game, multiplayer is a defo no go

 

[thicc_girls_are_teh_best]

Can anyone tell me why Bo_Hazem thought this was hilarious? Like really, it's a company upgrading their server blades, how is that funny? Is it because the company has a console that starts with an X?

 

[Bo_Hazem]

Can anyone tell me why Bo_Hazem thought this was hilarious? Like really, it's a company upgrading their server blades, how is that funny? Is it because the company has a console that starts with an X?

Because it's still 720p, highly compressed streaming. Enjoy it.

 

[Dee Dah Dave]

Is this why I can’t buy a series x because they hoarded them all for themselves?

 

[M1chl]

Because it's still 720p, highly compressed streaming. Enjoy it.

Well it's still for insiders as far as I know. Well maybe not for phones, but for PCs. As a beta, I think the quality is rather good and titles which aren't on PC or cross play my GF plays with me through Xcloud, I feel that it's pretty good feature which is included GamePass: U.

Don't laugh at something which brings joy to others.

Nah, laugh at everything you want, thankfully woman who never played games before she found me is not that demanding

 

[Mr.ODST]

Can anyone tell me why Bo_Hazem thought this was hilarious? Like really, it's a company upgrading their server blades, how is that funny? Is it because the company has a console that starts with an X?

Because he is a grade A bellend

 

[Bo_Hazem]

Well it's still for insiders as far as I know. Well maybe not for phones, but for PCs. As a beta, I think the quality is rather good and titles which aren't on PC or cross play my GF plays with me through Xcloud, I feel that it's pretty good feature which is included GamePass: U.

Don't laugh at something which brings joy to others.

Nah, laugh at everything you want, thankfully woman who never played games before she found me is not that demanding

All power to you, mate. But extreme input lag, blocky 720p streaming isn't really my thing.

 

[elliot5]

All power to you, mate. But extreme input lag, blocky 720p streaming isn't really my thing.

I mean, it's clear you haven't tried it (not that I would expect you to have a GPU sub and invite). It's not blocky at all, no worse than a 1080p Twitch stream. "extreme" input lag is a bit much, but I guess it depends on region and internet. Here in the States it's hardly noticeable input lag with the upgrade. It's fine to not want to stream games, but it's hard to deny the tech and ability for outreach. Sony will eventually upgrade their PSNow service to PS5 servers, too, and I'm sure it'll run well then just like xCloud is right now.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

I mean, it's clear you haven't tried it (not that I would expect you to have a GPU sub and invite). It's not blocky at all, no worse than a 1080p Twitch stream. "extreme" input lag is a bit much, but I guess it depends on region and internet. Here in the States it's hardly noticeable input lag with the upgrade. It's fine to not want to stream games, but it's hard to deny the tech and ability for outreach. Sony will eventually upgrade their PSNow service to PS5 servers, too, and I'm sure it'll run well then just like xCloud is right now.

You can't even stream games here with GP, also you need an Xbox console to do some maneuver and make a GPU account that's usable on PC, but only downloadable. If it's streaming it'll be more than 400-500ms from the US and 250-400ms from Europe. Xbox isn't officially released here, nor supported by MS.

 

[M1chl]

All power to you, mate. But extreme input lag, blocky 720p streaming isn't really my thing.

It depends on location I guess, here not many Xbox players and it's straight up like 5kms from here where MS have servers with few xbox blades. It's actually more responsive, than if you want to play game on your local network, that shit fucking sucks. Not sure what they were thinking.

Also it's not my thing, I never play on that, I am playing on my XSX. It saved me money to not buying a second Xbox.

I am not saying it's ideal, but it works : )

 

[Reizo Ryuu]

All power to you, mate. But extreme input lag, blocky 720p streaming isn't really my thing.

It should be 1080p on pc now with the series x server blade upgrades, and it's definitely not "blocky" when I try it.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

It depends on location I guess, here not many Xbox players and it's straight up like 5kms from here where MS have servers with few xbox blades. It's actually more responsive, than if you want to play game on your local network, that shit fucking sucks. Not sure what they were thinking.

Also it's not my thing, I never play on that, I am playing on my XSX. It saved me money to not buying a second Xbox.

I am not saying it's ideal, but it works : )

When both PS Now and GP offer a fully downloadable models here at least with no BS, no VPN, no US accounts then I might give some a month when I find a game that's not worth the full price/more than $10.

 

[M1chl]

When both PS Now and GP offer a fully downloadable models here at least with no BS, no VPN, no US accounts then I might give some a month when I find a game that's not worth the full price/more than $10.

It's not supported in your country so far? Well PS Now is also not here WHY Sony

 

[Dr Bass]

I mean, it's clear you haven't tried it (not that I would expect you to have a GPU sub and invite). It's not blocky at all, no worse than a 1080p Twitch stream. "extreme" input lag is a bit much, but I guess it depends on region and internet. Here in the States it's hardly noticeable input lag with the upgrade. It's fine to not want to stream games, but it's hard to deny the tech and ability for outreach. Sony will eventually upgrade their PSNow service to PS5 servers, too, and I'm sure it'll run well then just like xCloud is right now.

I don't understand why anyone would want this. I don't want to see any compression, and I don't want to experience even a hint of latency. I also don't want my basic game performance to be dependent on network latency/bandwidth. Especially after some of my recent game experiences ...

I just don't get this from a quality standpoint. I DO get it from a standpoint of wanting to try and increase their subscriber count without selling hardware but ... to what end? It's like selling frozen TV dinners and saying "No no, this is REAL steak we promise!"

And yeah I've tried recent streaming services. IMO you can still definitely tell. And I have low latency fiber gigabit at home.

I don't personally want to play console games on my phone. Or a laptop. Or any other kind of device with hampered inputs, bad sound, and small screens. I like playing on my large tv, dolby atmos capable surround, and on a comfortable couch, with no lag and no compromises. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play something like Forza, Starfield, or Flight Sim on a phone through a browser with a compressed video stream and noticeable latency. Saying it's "no worse than a 1080p Twitch stream" isn't exactly selling it either.

Also this whole thing is kind of ironic when MS actually used the phrase "uncompressed pixels" to market the One X.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

It's not supported in your country so far? Well PS Now is also not here WHY Sony

You can get GP with some fuckery and hassle, but PS Now is so far IMPOSSIBLE as you need a US credit card, or a card from a country supported.

They should keep those streaming bullshot to those countries and offer download-only to other countries if they seriously want more exposure. It's an expensive, useless feature to most gamers (streaming) so cutting the expenses and making it a fully rental, downloadable model would make both have more money to spend on bringing better quality games to their services instead of dedicating more than $400-500+ HW per streamer.

 

[CrustyBritches]

Here comes the PlayStation fanboys to shit the discussion up.

 

[elliot5]

I don't understand why anyone would want this. I don't want to see any compression, and I don't want to experience even a hint of latency. I also don't want my basic game performance to be dependent on network latency/bandwidth. Especially after some of my recent game experiences ...

I just don't get this from a quality standpoint. I DO get it from a standpoint of wanting to try and increase their subscriber count without selling hardware but ... to what end? It's like selling frozen TV dinners and saying "No no, this is REAL steak we promise!"

And yeah I've tried recent streaming services. IMO you can still definitely tell. And I have low latency fiber gigabit at home.

I don't personally want to play console games on my phone. Or a laptop. Or any other kind of device with hampered inputs, bad sound, and small screens. I like playing on my large tv, dolby atmos capable surround, and on a comfortable couch, with no lag and no compromises. I can't imagine why anyone would want to play something like Forza, Starfield, or Flight Sim on a phone through a browser with a compressed video stream and noticeable latency. Saying it's "no worse than a 1080p Twitch stream" isn't exactly selling it either.

Also this whole thing is kind of ironic when MS actually used the phrase "uncompressed pixels" to market the One X.

because it's an option. someone making cloud streaming their only method is curious, but it's not unfeasible. Stadia works totally fine if you have decent internet and don't want to invest a bunch in hardware or want ease of access to your library.

I prefer local hardware, too. But I'm not gonna say "well, I don't like it so there's no point to it at all!" The tech is great. Something like Starfield will absolutely be playable through xCloud only and I expect by Nov 2022 the quality/availability will have only increased.

I'll always prefer my PC and console for at home use, but laying in bed playing Yakuza Like a Dragon with zero noticeable artifacts and no input latency problems, zero aliasing or stutters, is super convenient. I look forward to being able to kill time at the airport or elsewhere by just being able to load up a stream in 5 seconds.

 

[Bo_Hazem]

Here comes the PlayStation fanboys to shit the discussion up.

Thanks to thicc_girls_are_teh_best for dragging me here. Now my stomach is empty so I can move on.