Look, I’m not the most technically inclined person. I understand systems fairly well, you know, macro stuff. When it comes to cloud computing, I get lost in the details. I can’t tell you exactly how Azure, Microsoft’s cloud-computing technology, works. All I can tell you is that for video games, developers can potentially allocate some processing jobs to the cloud (things like computations for AI, for example) to free up some power for other things, like rendering textures or effects processing. Titanfall is kind of the flagship example for what this technology can do; AI computations were handled with the help of Azure, which meant that the game could look better and run more smoothly on the Xbox One.
While Xbox One exclusives are where you would expect to see this technology at work, Phil Spencer has made it clear that other platforms are welcome to use Azure’s services as well. Someone tweeted Spencer, commenting that they’d hate to see Titanfall 2 give up Azure’s benefits because its being a multi-platform game. Spencer replied that Azure services “…are available to any game, even other platform’s exclusives. We wouldn’t keep someone from using [it].” I’m wondering just how big of a difference this makes. Knowing that the PS4 recently freed up an additional CPU core for developers to take advantage of, I’m wondering if that extra processing power, plus the benefit of cloud computation, could lead to games that look and play better than anything we’ve seen to date. Only time will tell, I suppose.
Source: Gamespot