Microsoft announces Azure game development virtual machine

Microsoft has announced the Azure game development virtual machine, an offering that makes modern game creation easier and opens the door for game developers to take full advantage of game production in the cloud. 

Key benefits:

1. Powerful compute: Game development studios require powerful computers for GPU-intensive jobs, but they need to access them without latency to support their high-performance tasks.

2. Remote studio enablement: Using Parsec or Teradici with cloud VMs enables remote work from anywhere. 

3. Global-scale: The speed and accessibility of global scale enables studios to take advantage of dark fiber networking across the globe.

4. Faster builds: Burstable compute capabilities enable faster builds, which is especially true when using technologies like Incredibuild for accelerated compiling and asset cooking across hundreds of distributed cores.

5. Deeper collaboration: With high-fidelity, low-latency desktop options like Parsec and Teradici, game creators get faster production and testing cycles from anywhere. Parsec's high-performance and seamless screen sharing functionality also allows you to share your desktop or creative work easily and securely. Unreal Engine Pixel Streaming enables collaboration and efficiency.

6. Efficient testing: The cloud powers efficiency of testing by enabling quick turnaround times for game testers to get compiled builds faster for testing.

Microsoft has announced the public preview of the Azure Game Development Virtual Machine. The tech giant has partnered with top game development tooling partners to offer a pre-built Game Development Virtual Machine in Azure, packed with core game development solutions pre-installed like Visual Studio Community Edition 2019; Unreal Engine; Quixel Bridge; Perforce's P4V Client; Parsec; Incredibuild; Blender; Teradici; DirectX/GDK/PlayFab SDKs and more

This allows developers to quickly spin up a functional game dev workstation or build server in around five minutes, which enables easier validation of pipeline performance, pull down code/art assets from a Perforce repo to develop and test games right from the cloud. Additionally, it saves hours of downloads and configurations to get the environment needed for game creation.