To follow in the footsteps of the gameindustry.biz article, Xbox.com just got updated. Apparently this is Xbox Live week and Xbox Live Compute might be a branding phrase. New page on Xbox.com detailing it:

Hi! My name is John Bruno – I am a Lead Program Manager from the Xbox Live team. For as long as I can remember, games have been part of my life. Whether it was playing my Commodore 64 in my basement as a young kid, feeding my spare quarters into arcade machines in the 1980s, or playing “Project Gotham Racing” on the original Xbox - I have always enjoyed playing video games. We’ve obviously come a long way with games since I started playing, and for me personally, it has been an incredible experience bringing Xbox One to life and supporting the forthcoming game titles that are launching on this console generation. I’m especially proud of what our team has been working on with Xbox Live Compute, and I’m glad to finally be able to share more details with you as part of the “Week of Xbox Live!”

• Higher fidelity game experiences – As I mentioned before, cloud compute can enable developers to offload computations for all sorts of environmental elements. In a typical game development scenario, the game creator needs to balance resource allocation across each area – world management, rendering, controls, networking, lighting, physics, AI, as well as networking and multiplayer. Balancing the local computing resources for all of these elements often results in developers making tradeoffs that result in more focus on core gameplay, and less on environments, NPC and other elements of world fidelity. However, when cloud compute is available to support the various computationally-intensive elements of the game, these kinds of tradeoffs become much easier for developers to make. Games can afford to provide higher fidelity worlds and deeply intelligent NPC AIall at the same time. These experiences could only be accomplished by leveraging the resources of servers.

• Improved multiplayer game experiences – This is perhaps the most obvious example of what is possible with Xbox Live Compute – dedicated servers!If you have played a lot of multiplayer games, you know that playing on dedicated game servers has advantages over peer-to-peer gameplay. With server-based multiplayer gaming, not only can more players play the game (think hundreds of players simultaneously), the gameplay will be much more reliable for the players. No more host migration interruptions, suboptimal experiences for the host, home network NAT constraints, or player cheating! Additionally, Xbox Live Compute can be utilized to persist game state so that your squad can live to fight another day without losing any progress. A great example of a game that is using Xbox Live Compute for their dedicated server multiplayer experience is “Titanfall.”

• Adaptive & evolving game play – Imagine the game you play every day improving each time you log in. Imagine joining a match in your favorite first person shooter to find new maps and game modes even though you never downloaded a game update. Imagine playing with your friend even when he/she is not online. When games are powered by Xbox Live Compute, they can be dynamically updated, tuned, changed, and improved continuously. Games will evolve and live on for greater periods of time, continually providing fresh content and new experiences. The flagship example of this application of cloud computing can be found with “Forza Motorsports 5, “and itsDrivatar system.

• On-demand compute improves game availability – With all of the potentially interesting things that can be accomplished with Xbox Live Compute, one of the most important things is that the resources (e.g. servers) are available when gamers need it most. It is the geographic availability of this service, and its elastic scalability that enables gamers to connect to an available server and play without experiencing busy or unavailable servers. This ensures that games meet the changing demands of their player communities for compute, and gamers experience optimal connectivity based upon their geographic location. Additionally, it means that game creators can be assured that the server capacity they need, in the appropriate geographies, will be there when they need it.

http://news.xbox.com/2013/10/xbox-one-cloud

The most exciting 3 words that anyone who knows what the hell this implies are rendering, physics and lighting. All that other crap, even dedicated servers, are small potatoes compared to those right there.

Bring it on!

Well according to your Brigade 3 jizzfest, MS and Sony are dummies that are already left in the dust. Which is it?

Both. What's hard to grasp? Consoles are too weak to run it out of the box. But this could make it happen. However, it should have never come down to it. Servers shouldn't be used to make up that difference. It should have been something above and beyond because obviously a lot of gamers aren't going to have the internet access to take advantage of it, and not all games will have access to this level of compute.

But as far as me personally, I'm set up for it. And I'm sure I'll get to see it on Onlive or on dedicated PC hardware. before it ever comes to consoles. It's better than nothing though, as this tech will make the tech inside the consoles seriously outdated if that is all they had for the next 6-8 years. Thankfully it sounds like they're prepped or are prepping for upscaling.