Microsoft researchers presented the DeLorean, which is a cloud gaming system that looks to eliminate lag.
Cloud gaming is a system where game execution and rendering is performed by remote servers, as compared to having thin clients sending input and then displaying output frames. This system allows any device to play any game, at any time.
However, the problem with the cloud gaming system is that latencies in networks often diminish the gaming experience, whether the cloud gaming system be booted up through Wi-Fi, cellular or wired networks. Latencies often exceed 100ms, which is far above how most gamers can accept lag in the responsiveness of game controls.
Enter the DeLorean, which is developed and presented in a research paper by Microsoft researchers David Chu, Eduardo Cuervo, Jason Flinn, Sergey Grizan, Johannes Kopf, Kyungmin Lee, and Alec Wolman.
According to the research paper, the DeLorean is "a speculative execution system for mobile cloud gaming that is able to mask up to 250ms of network latency," which would virtually eliminate any lag that players are experiencing.
The DeLorean executes this by creating "speculative rendered frames of future possible outcomes, delivering them to the client one entire RTT ahead of time."
In other words, the DeLorean looks to predict the next move of gamers as they play the game, and draws up the renderings of the frames in advance so that they are delivered instantly to the game.
The DeLorean combines four aspects into this highly ambitious cloud gaming system, namely future input prediction, time shifting and state space subsampling, misprediction compensation and bandwidth compression.
The researchers tested the DeLorean by having gamers play two popular games with it in place. The first game is the first-person shooting game Doom 3, and the second game is the role-playing action game Fable 3.
User reviews and performance comparisons reveal that gamers mostly prefer DeLorean gaming compared to regular thin-client gaming, as playing on the DeLorean is like playing across a network with very low latency.
However, while all these benefits of the DeLorean show promise for the cloud gaming system, there is one major disadvantage. Because the DeLorean creates several predictions and sends them all to gamers, the system would require much bandwidth. The researchers revealed that a DeLorean set-up required 1.5 times to 4.5 times higher usage of bandwidth compared to standard gaming scenarios.
There are no details if Microsoft will be looking to implement the DeLorean on its Xbox gaming consoles, though the company had already experimented with cloud gaming in the past, with a few Xbox One games using dedicated servers through Xbox Live to decrease the processing load experienced by the gaming consoles.
