Microsoft‘s idea could change the support of older games forever.

Microsoft acquired Playfab in 2018. This company provides tools that use the cloud infrastructure, and what does Microsoft have? A ton of Azure data servers. James Gwertzman, the founder of Playfab, stayed with the company since, and he told in an interview that one of the Xbox Game Studios teams is using machine learning and cloud computing that they use to upscale textures in real-time: „It’s working scarily well. To the point where we’re looking at shipping low-res textures and having ML models uprez the textures in real-time. You can’t tell the difference between the hand-authored high-res texture and the machine-scaled-up low-res texture, to the point that you may as well ship the low-res texture and let the machine do it,” he said.

So the games could take less space on your discs and SSDs. If we pair this technology to ESRGAN, an already existing AI technology (you can see it in action below), then the result would be outstanding. AMD and Nvidia both use similar technologies.

Sony and Microsoft work together on cloud-based technology. They signed a deal about it last year. Microsoft’s Azure servers could lift deep learning and artificial intelligence (AI) tools to a new level. And the PlayStation 5 is rumoured to play more than just PS5 and PlayStation 5 games, so something could be used in the background. However, we have to add that the automatic upscaling doesn’t work that much yet.

„It only works by training the models on very specific sets. One genre of game. There’s no universal texture map. That would be kind of magical. It’s more like if you train it on specific textures it works with those, but it wouldn’t work with a whole different set. It’s especially good for photorealism because that adds tons of data. It may not work so well for a fantasy art style. But my point is that I think the fact that that’s technology now — game development has always been hard in terms of the sheer number of disciplines you have to master,” Gwertzman added.

In short: the PlayStation 5 might have smaller games because of similar technology in the background. Yet, it sounds like the future of tomorrow, and Microsoft has named Amazon and Google as their rivals for a good reason: they have similarly expanded cloud infrastructure that they could use to improve the texture quality.

Source: PSL

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