For game developers and the users they serve, the future is cloudy—and that’s a good thing. Increasingly, the infrastructure for developing and delivering games to end users will be located in cloud-based datacenters equipped to power graphically rich workloads.
There are many advantages—and challenges—for publishers who want to deliver high-quality gaming experiences via the public cloud.
One of the challenges is, of course, latency. There are many ways to address this issue. One method is to bring the backend servers closer to end users by distributing the workload across multiple, geographically-dispersed cloud service providers (CSPs). All of these cloud-based datacenters need to support graphics processing, and this is where we see an opportunity to leverage industry-standard Intel® CPUs with integrated graphics processing units (GPUs).
At my company, GameFly* Streaming, we are excited about the opportunity to offer gaming solutions that take advantage of cloud-based graphics processing. We have worked closely with Intel on the ability to expand cloud gaming infrastructure capabilities by deploying Intel® Xeon® processors with on-chip graphics. We view this as a natural extension of the gaming services we currently provide that rely on GPUs in the cloud.
By taking advantage of the energy-efficient performance and low total cost of ownership of the Intel® Xeon® Processor E3 family with integrated graphics, we see an opportunity to simplify cloud infrastructure that will ultimately improve the gaming experience of end users.
The fact that cloud-based graphics processing can support a resource-intensive workload like gaming suggests that just about any graphically-rich workload can now be delivered from the cloud—including remote desktops, remote workstations, and even 3D CAD design applications. And cloud service providers are also recognizing the opportunity to deliver complex visual workloads leveraging Intel processors with on-chip graphics. This integrated CPU and GPU architecture can streamline their qualification process, which helps them quickly deploy new infrastructure.
This week at the Game Developers Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, I will be joined by David Hoff, Director of Cloud Graphics at Intel, for a session titled Simplifying Cloud Gaming Infrastructure with Intel Xeon Processors. We will demonstrate how developers can leverage the capabilities provided by the newIntel Xeon Processor E3 family featuring Intel® Iris™ Pro Graphics to develop and deploy games and applications that are delivered via the cloud. Please stop by and say hello, or connect with me on LinkedIn for more information if you’re not able to make it to GDC.
For a deeper dive right now, visit GameFly Streaming to learn how we give users easy, instant access to console games on the connected devices they use in their daily lives. Also, check out Intel’s visual cloudwebsite to learn more about their solutions for video delivery, cloud graphics, and visual understanding workloads.
For more such intel resources and tools from Intel on Game, please visit the Intel® Game Developer Zone
Source:https://software.intel.com/en-us/blogs/2017/02/28/streamlining-cloud-gaming-infrastructure
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