To improve one's cloud-based gaming capabilities, Microsoft has decided to take on the fourth dimension.

There's a lot going on in that sentence, so we'll break it down. First off, no, Microsoft isn't really bending space and time in order to make your favorite video games play better (that might test the Xbox One's limits, we suspect). It is, however, testing a new "speculative execution engine" that it calls DeLorean.

The entire point of DeLorean is to minimize the effect of lag on cloud gaming. In other words, if we ever get to a point where copies of games are no longer purchased and run from consoles, but instead streamed to them from a (much more powerful) centralized server, Microsoft wants that experience to feel just as good as if you loaded up the game locally.

According to Microsoft's research, gamers can notice as little as 60 milliseconds worth of latency when playing a multiplayer title. Once the game starts going north of 100 milliseconds, they start to get annoyed. Jumping to anywhere from 150 to 250 milliseconds results in user engagement lowering by around 75 percent or so. Which is to saylag is bad, and more lag tends to annoy people.

Using DeLorean, however, Microsoft was able to present players with an experience that had 250 milliseconds of lag on the back end and they didn't notice a thing.

"We demonstrated DeLorean on Doom 3, a twitch-based first person shooter, and Fable 3, an action roleplaying game because they belong to popular game genres with demanding response times. This leads us to be optimistic about the work of applying DeLorean to other genres," reads Microsoft's paper.

"We found that players overwhelmingly favor DeLorean's masking of high RTT times over naked exposure to long latency. In turn, this enables cloud gaming providers to reach a much larger community while maintaining a high level of user experience."

So how, then, does Microsoft make its secret sauce? It's (relatively) simple: Microsoft's DeLorean system takes a look at what a player is doing at any given point and extrapolates all the possible movements. It streams a rendering of these from a server to a player's console. Thus, when a player decides what he or she plans to do, that scenefor a lack of a better way to phrase itis already ready to go.

Of course, that means a lot more data being sent to one's system, given all the possibilities that a gamer can do at any given point.

"The transmission of possible outcome frames from server to client consumes added bandwidth. To reduce this overhead, we develop a video encoding scheme which provides better compression than standard encoding by taking advantage of the visual similarity of speculated frames," reads Microsoft's paper.

"We show that while several of our compression techniques are able to dampen increased bandwidth costs, DeLorean exhibits a bitrate that is a factor of 1.54.5x higher than standard cloud gaming systems. On the whole, we believe this is a reasonable trade-off for service providers who are otherwise unable to offer users low-latency interactivity," Microsoft describes elsewhere.

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