OT: The Cloud could potentially fix the CPU bottleneck, but until we see real world examples of the Cloud and the demands it takes for internet bandwidth (which is the greatest limiting factor of the Cloud, since they can't make games with high demands since it alienates the majority of the world's gaming market) the cloud cannot be a reliable alternative.

@mhunterjr & Ubisoft

I'd really like to see multiple situations where a CPU bottleneck forces developers to reduce resolution which is a GPU bound bottleneck.

An RTS is the best demonstration for this. RTS are generally CPU bound games, and when a game is CPU bound the fps drops on weaker CPUs since it can't process the data fast enough to produce the full fps the GPU is rendering. So dropping from 60fps to 30fps is believable due to the sheer number of characters on screen of which I seriously doubt they'll be nearly as revolutionary or useful as Ubisoft wants us to believe. Why purpose end up with a game that's CPU bound when you can simply reduce the number of NPC's to several hundred which would still be 3x the normal 100 - 150x you had putting you up to a 500 NPC count per area of the city.

A game that is GPU bound is what effects resolution, where lowering the resolution and graphics settings can effect performance.

abizzel, you are forgetting the real limiting factor of the cloud, not bandwidth but latency. Bandwidth is how much data can be sent at once, latency is how long that chunk of data takes to get from point a to point b. Our modern internet connections have enough bandwidth to handle cloud based rendering/computing, but our latencies are far from it. When you are rendering a game at 60fps, you have 16ms to complete every single one of your calculations that next frame depends upon... less time than that when you factor in the few ms it will take to render the actual frame after calculations are ready. So, that data would need to be able to get to the server, get computed, and be sent back to the console well within that 16ms limit or you are dropping frames.

This is why the only cloud-aided rendering demo MS has ever shown was running on a PC at 720p and 30fps. Even then it was only a simple demo of a poorly rendered building blowing up. Also, the servers were close by on a local network, not running over the actual internet.

Fr0sty you seem confused. We are discussing the potential in offloading AI, not in rendering anything.

So...we're all okay with forcing everyone to be connected to the internet at all times when playing our games now??