Cloud-based gaming is seen by some as the future of gaming, but there's a big issue that is keeping this future at the back of the park. This issue is called lag, and Microsoft is hoping to fix it with a new engine called DeLorean, not to be mistaken with the car from Back to the Future.
While Microsoft is not using DeLorean from Back to the Future, the company is not manipulating space and time either. We understand that good ole Microsoft is testing what it calls a "speculative execution engine" known as DeLorean, and if everything goes according to plan, the lagging issues plaguing cloud gaming could finally come to an end.
Now, DeLorean won't completely do away with lag issues in cloud gaming, but could minimize the effects, so playing a video game via the cloud should perform on similar levels to playing the same game locally. According to Microsoft, gamers are capable of noticing around 60 milliseconds of lag while playing a multiplayer game. As the lag increases to over 100 milliseconds and into the 200 range, gamers will slowly begin to get annoyed.
At this point, up to 75 percent of gamers would stop engaging with the product. This would likely cause a decrease in profit and gamers moving to another platform or giving up on cloud gaming entirely.
However, by using the new DeLorean technology, Microsoft was able to offer gamers a video game experience with around 250 milliseconds on the back-end, but for some reason, these gamers did not notice any form of changes to gameplay.
"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," stated Microsoft in a report.
For those who are interested, the specs of DeLorean are not that awesome at the moment, but more impressive when compared to what we're running with right now.
From what we understand, DeLorean packs an Intel Core-i7 quad-core processor, and 16GB worth of RAM. In addition, the system packs a sweet Nvidia GTX680 GPU with 4GB of VRAM; impressed? We know.
Microsoft's new way of doing things would require more data traveling to and from, so users with a monthly data cap could be in some serious trouble. Then again, we see no reason for folks with data caps to even consider streaming video games from the cloud.
We're quite intrigued with Microsoft's DeLorean cloud-based engine for video games. We could be very well looking at the future of Xbox and Windows PC gaming.
