Forza Motorsport 5’s cloud processing means the ‘end of A.I.’

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LOS ANGELES — Microsoft just showed off Forza Motorsport 5 at the Xbox briefing at the Electronic Entertainment Expo. And this title not only looks sweet. It has an innovation in “cloud processing,” said Dan Greenawalt, creative director at Turn 10 Studios.

Microsoft doesn’t have a faster box than Sony’s PlayStation 4, according to expert assessments. But it did architect the
box in a way that allows it to tap cloud-based processing in its web-connected data centers, where it has 300,000 servers waiting to do its bidding.

In this case, Greenawalt says the artificial intelligence processing of the race cars has been offloaded to the cloud. As a result, we will see the “end of A.I.,” he said. That means that the “Drivatar” character that mimics your driving patterns will be based in the cloud as a “learning agent.” It means that the car will race smarter, nailing corners when it turns on a track, just like a human driver will.

That’s a tall order, but that’s what Greenawalt promised with Forza Motorsport 5.

Dean Takahashi

Dean Takahashi is editorial director for GamesBeat at VentureBeat. He has been a tech journalist since 1988, and he has covered games as a beat since 1996. He was lead writer for GamesBeat at VentureBeat from 2008 to April 2025. Prior to that, he wrote for the San Jose Mercury News, the Red Herring, the Wall Street Journal, the Los Angeles Times, and the Dallas Times-Herald. He is the author of two books, "Opening the Xbox" and "The Xbox 360 Uncloaked." He organizes the annual GamesBeat Next, GamesBeat Summit and GamesBeat Insider Series: Hollywood and Games conferences and is a frequent speaker at gaming and tech events. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.