Microsoft has been working on the idea of processing games in the cloud for years. It started when the company introduced the Xbox One in May 2013 and described it as being a cloud-powered machine. However, since then we haven’t seen many games take advantage of this Cloud except for processing AI data in games such as Forza Motorsport 5 and Titanfall. Thing is, over time the company plan on offloading actual processing into the Cloud.
During Microsoft’s 2013 Annual Company Meeting which was the last held by previous CEO Steve Ballmer, the company showed Halo 4 (the full Xbox 360 title) running on a the Nokia Lumia 520. That entire project was code-named Rio. Then we had DeLoreon, which render frames before an event occurs in a game and based on your inputs, the platform delivers the correct set of frames to your device. Since then, we heard of Arcadia which was a project to replace the discontinued Rio. It was built on Microsoft Azure and would allow users to stream high-quality games and apps to Windows device. Now we have Kahawai and DeLoreon has be renamed to Outatime.
Outatime (DeLoreon) and Kahawai are both Microsoft Research projects as part of the companies mission to allow game data to be processed outside of the hardware of a device. DeLoreon would save up to 250ms of latency and would allow future input prediction, state space subsampling and time shifting, misprediction compensation and bandwidth compression. Similar to Arcadia, this projects main focus was streaming games such as Fable (which was used internally in the companies testing) onto Windows and Xbox devices.
Sources tell me that Arcadia is the name of the team working on the Microsoft game and app streaming technology. It’s also most likely fully using the DeLoreon technology from August 2014 and Microsoft have been hiring for Arcadia since January 2015. Arcadia’s focus is to act as another Windows service that would be on Windows devices including phones, tablets, desktops and the Xbox One. It also supports both app and game streaming and rumour had it the company had considered using the technology to stream Android apps to Windows Phone.
So what’s Kahawai? This is Microsoft’s plan to improve mobile gaming by off-loading GPU cycles to the cloud using two separate techniques for collaborative rendering. The first allows a mobile device to render each frame with reduced detail and the cloud will deliver the ‘deltas’ between the low and high quality rendering to improve frame quality. The second has the mobile device render a subset of frames while the cloud streams the missing frames to improve image quality.
Both of the above techniques are compatible with existing H.264 video decoders that are found inside most modern smartphones meaning this technology could work for mobile gaming across the millions of phones around the world. Kahawai has been tested with successful results on games such as Lost Planet 2 and Street Fighter IV. The project also mentions that both 720p and 1080p can be supported by this method.
The mobile device is only offloading GPU work and it uses 1/6th of the bandwidth of other thin-client streaming devices. The source code is only required for the game engine and once implanted at engine level, it can work with any game using that engine. If no source code is provided, that reduces variation in the games supported by the technology.
What I’ve wrote about Kahawai is in the simple form, if you want to read into far more detail, you can check out the Microsoft Research paper here. My overall opinion on Kahawai is this will be part of the Arcadia technology, with its main focus being mobile devices.
As for Xbox One, the upcoming Crackdown game will off-load resources to the Cloud to create greater destructions at a solid frame-rate. Microsoft showed this off in a demo at Build 2014 before announcing the game at E3 2014. This will be one of the first of many games to incorporate the Cloud Computing found in Microsoft Azure to process game data outside of the Xbox One hardware. The Xbox One game-streaming feature for Windows 10 is simply mirroring and streaming what’s on your Xbox One to a Windows 10 device. The Xbox One hardware processes the game however, not the Cloud and this technology is outside of what the Arcadia team is working on. Arcadia will have the games process all or certain data in the Cloud before reaching the device.
^Alan (@BeetleComet)
Alan Walsh is a games journalist, head writer at AR12Gaming. They contributed 52 articles to ICXM in 2015, focused on game reviews, Windows and PC, and Xbox news: leads editorial for AR12Gaming and reviews titles for OpenCritic.