Bethesda Softworks has decided to get involved in the increasingly competitive field of cloud gaming. Instead of creating a product that would directly compete with Microsoft's Project Xcloud or Google Stadia, however, the publisher decided to create Orion, a system is focused on improving streaming performance on the platforms that already exist.
Orion is supposed to complement, not compete with, these kinds of services. Bethesda announced the news at the 2019 E3 show in Los Angeles, where cloud gaming hype is intense.
"This can be put into any game engine; it can be used with any streaming platform to provide a better experience for any consumer playing that game on that platform and to deliver it at a lower cost for whoever's serving the data," promises Bethesda director of publishing James Altman. Essentially, it works by delegating some processing tasks to the game engine locally, rather than performing them as they're transmitted to the player over the internet.
The video game publisher also said that this should bring game streaming players living far away from data centers. This is a big deal, considering all game streaming services require players to live close to the host data center for an optimum experience.
Bethesda promises Orion will deliver twitchy gameplay with "imperceptible latency." It certainly is a gift for mobile gamers, given the fact the cellular networks aren't exactly the best avenue to stream games. Whether it's the erratic latency or limited data caps in some parts of the world, gamers who want to stream over mobile networks could benefit most from this type of technology.
The publisher demonstrated Orion tech by playing Doom 2016 at 60fps and with "high" visual quality on a smartphone. Average bandwidth usage in a 10-minute gameplay test reportedly dropped from 23.43 Mbps to 13.67 Mbps at the demo, while GPU utilization on the server side dropped from a high of 64 percent to a low of 55 percent.
If this got you all curious, you can sign up for a preview here. Unfortunately, the first preview is limited to iOS11+ devices right now, but you can also sign up to be notified if you're on PC or Android.
"With Orion, players can live far from data centers and still be able to stream Doom at 60fps, with 4K resolution and without perceptible latency," Altman promised.
