The smartphone is a unique device. Billions of them are in active use around the world, all of them are capable of internet access and all are equipped with video decoding capabilities – everything needed for streaming gameplay online. While it’ll take time to completely solve the many challenges the technology has, the reality is that the smartphone can take cutting-edge games to people and places that consoles can’t reach. That’s the endgame with Microsoft’s Project xCloud – to add a new way to play for the console gamers of today but with an eye towards explosive growth in new markets, delivering Xbox games on a global scale without the need for users to buy Microsoft hardware. Everyone owns a smartphone, right?
As evidenced by the recent launch of Google Stadia, cracking the technical challenges in streaming gameplay isn’t easy – and it’s the key reason why Project xCloud is still in beta. Delivering movies and TV shows to a mobile device is a walk in the park by comparison: video can be buffered to cover up inconsistencies in data delivery, while the pre-recorded nature of video means that compression can be incredibly efficient. Any given frame can borrow data from prior frames or ones that have still yet to be displayed. Streaming gameplay video – gameplay video – is a couple of orders of magnitude more complex.
Google’s Stadia aims to be all things to all gamers – a streaming service that scales from your phone all the way up to your 4K HDR TV – but xCloud as it presents right now is something quite different. It’s significantly less ambitious in some respects, but delivers a far richer experience in others. Suffice to say that the key difference right now is that Microsoft’s focus is 100 per cent on mobile devices – specifically the smartphone. It’s highly likely that PC and TV options will follow in due course, but the emphasis of the xCloud beta is all about getting the experience right on everyone’s favourite companion device.
There are four key components to the xCloud experience: the server blades, the client devices, the controller and the app. The servers are currently third generation iterations, running on custom motherboards but still based on standard Xbox One S silicon. Microsoft has achieved a 30 per cent drop in power consumption by using the Hovis Method – the technique of individually tuning power delivery for the needs of each individual processor, a system first used with Xbox One X. The server blades run customised low-level software that runs the OS as per normal, just like a normal Xbox One S, but also interfaces with an external video encoder on the motherboard, tuning the feed to best suit the connection to the user.
Based on my discussions with Microsoft at the recent X019, there are a couple of interesting facts here: first of all, the Xbox One S silicon is set to output at 120Hz, lowering latency by ensuring that new frames reach the encoder as soon as possible (the onboard encoder in the Xbox One S processor used for game capture isn’t active for xCloud service). Secondly, the CPU component of the processor runs at a higher clock than standard retail units, in order to accommodate the extra demands put on the chip by the encoding pipeline.