Developer says Xbox One's cloud gives 600 percent more power

Ever since Microsoft had announced the Xbox One’s cloud-computing capabilities, one of the biggest questions on everyone’s minds was: just how much power could this possibly give the console? Well, according to the Creative Director of Xbox One’s flagship racing title Forza 5, Dan Greenawalt, the Xbox One’s cloud is capable of around 600 times the power of the console itself.

Greenawalt talked about the cloud and how Forza 5 was set to use it in a recent interview with OXM. One of the biggest new features of Forza 5 on the Xbox One is the Drivatar system. It essentially lets the game check how you play and simulates an AI that plays like you. This AI will then place races when you don’t play, thus increasing the amount of money you make in-game.

Forza 5’s drivatars seem like a rather interesting idea

According to Greenawalt, the Drivatar system is being handled by the cloud because it would otherwise have taken up 10-20 percent of the raw hardware power of the console. Letting the cloud handle it lets the developers add more complexities to the system, which Greenawalt claims to boost the power of the consoles to 600 percent. This also frees up the 10-20 percent of the hardware that can be used for something else.

More from News & Analysis

What is the US HIRE Bill and why is India’s $250-billion IT sector worried? Is the internet dead? What's this theory that OpenAI's Sam Altman says might be true?

The Xbox One’s cloud is said to be very powerful, with many developers taking advantage of it to offload some of the calculations from the hardware. It is thanks to this and the ESRAM on the console that it has been able to go toe-to-toe with the PlayStation 4’s graphical capabilities, at least from what we can see in demo videos.