At the start of 2018, Microsoft acquired cloud gaming management company PlayFab. PlayFab was a cloud-based company that provides game management and analytics solutions, including multiplayer servers. Among its services are virtual currency tracking, leaderboards, authentication, commerce, and more. Shortly after the acquisition, Microsoft revealed plans to fold the company into Azure, creating Azure PlayFab. The company integrated features from the software into live game operations through Azure cloud. Among the services PlayFab brought to Microsoft are virtual currency tracking, leaderboards, authentication, commerce, and more. Azure PlayFab is now reaching more users thanks to an expansion into other regions. Microsoft says it is bringing PlayFab Multiplayer Server Hosting to India Central, UAE North, Korea Central, and U.S. West 2.
AMD Support
This expansion means a total of 22 Microsoft Azure regions now support PlayFab. Moreover, the platform now supports AMD virtual machines. Microsoft says the VMs boost performance by up to 40% and also save money. In its announcement, Microsoft explains the technical side of the AMD support: “The Azure Virtual Machine Dav4 and Dasv4 series feature the AMD 2.35Ghz EPYCTM 7452 2nd Generation processor in a multi-threaded configuration with up to 256 MB L3 cache, and each 8 cores have 8 MB of dedicated L3 cache. The Dav4-series sizes offer a combination of vCPU, memory and temporary storage that is suitable for most gaming workloads. The Dasv4 Azure VMs expose up to 96 vCPUs, 384 GBs of RAM, and 768 GBs of SSD-based storage.” Tip of the day: If your PC keeps connecting to the wrong WiFi network, you can set WiFi priority to avoid the need to manually select access points over and over again.