At E3 2019, Bethesda Softworks has announced that it’s bringing its very own platform that will improve cloud gaming performance. Orion, as the platform is called, can reportedly be added to a variety of games and be used in different game streaming services — it’s not really competing against players such as Stadia, but it’s trying to complement their capabilities and make them more accessible to players.
According to Bethesda’s director of publishing James Altman, “[Orion] 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.”
The company is claiming that Orion can improve game streaming by a considerable margin. According to Bethesda, turning on just one of Orion’s features can cut down on bandwidth requirement by 40%, it also reportedly reduces the encoding time for a frame of video by 30%, and the compute power needed by 20%.
All of those things make Orion sound like a pretty solid option for game streaming services to apply to their systems. After all, if Bethesda’s claims stand true, Orion could reduce the internet connection speeds required by game streaming services to provide a seamless experience to players, it could also make things easier and more cost-effective for game streaming providers by reducing the number of data centres required for a smooth, lag-free experience, and more.
Bethesda hasn’t announced a release date for Orion, but the company will be launching a limited beta test later this year. In the beta, players will be able to play Doom at 60FPS in 4K; and that sounds incredible.
