3d terrain tile streaming takes a crazy amount of data. it essentially downloads hundreds of png files at a time and overlays them over 3d terrain data. Everytime you move an inch or pan the camera, it pulls down new data.
That’s literally how every 3d game works (barring a few procedural games maybe). Now they just stream those texture and meshes as needed and presumably cache them.
Don’t get distracted by this terrible piece of an article. It never states how long this peak was. It could have been just 100ms. So interpolating this to 81gb/h make no sense at all. It’s just pure click bait.
In the end only the total volume downloaded matters (which the article of course doesn’t mention). Why wouldn’t you want to receive that as fast as possible?
it’s not the same. 3d games use polygons and shaders and whatnot. you can optimize things much easier in that space since it’s a lot more computational. 3d tiling is literally a bunch of png files being streamed down.
Yes, just like msfs does. They still use polygons and shaders… Polygons that make up the terrain and more and shaders that sample png tiles as textures… Msfs really does not do anything different than other games, outside of streaming in the assets instead of pre-installing them. Not sure why people think it’s any different.
kinda… graphics all end up as polygons eventually but 3d tile rendering has a lot of different considerations and limitations you don’t have with rendering a normal 3d asset rendering. check out things like CesiumJS that is an equivalent kind of technology
Other games store those png tiles locally. Which, sure, increases the installed size of the game. Storage is cheap though, might as well use it right? Like, even if this article is off by an order of magnitude, 8Gb/h is still a ton of data to stream just to play a video game. If other games also do that, that’s news to me. But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking. Storing all your texture tiles in the cloud and making your clients download and redownload them seems the opposite of efficient, or at least that they optimized for the wrong thing.
A highly compressed, global base map at 1m resolution is somewhere on the order of 10TB. MSFS is probably using higher resolution commercial imagery, and that’s just the basemap textures, most of which you’ll never see.
Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed, but it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game… I don’t get why this is so hard to grasp.
Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it? No you don’t, you let the program figure out which parts you actually need and stream it to you. Same exact thing, fot the exact same reason.
Storage is cheap
So is bandwidth. 8gb/h is only 2mb/s which was maybe a lot 25 years ago. These days you can’t even get a connection slower than 50/100mb/s
But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking.
Games try to be as efficient possible with their network code for real-time updates, so latency is minimalized. This is not at all important if you prefetch stuff minutes before you actually need it.
Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed
K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?
it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game…
Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?
Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.
Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it?
No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.
So is bandwidth
You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.
MSFS implements optimizations on top of that (progressive detail, compression, etc), but that’s how almost all map systems work under the hood. It’s actually an efficient way to represent real environments where you don’t have the luxury of procedural generation.
The world they built for the game is hundreds of terabytes, it’s really the only way to do it without forcing players to preload tiny chunks of the world and restrict their flight to only the ones they’ve downloaded.
A lot of isps are rolling out gigabit and even faster internet. Finally having a killer app for it will increase demand for it and shame slower isps to upgrade their old coaxial and copper cables with fiber.
I think the thing to note here is that ISPs roll those things out fully aware that hardly anyone who pays for that will actually USE that amount of data. They don’t want a killer app for it, they just want you to think you need that much data, and then never actually use it. In fact there are some places where regardless of your bandwidth, you have a monthly data allotment. This game represents a shift into super high bandwidth usage for the general non-technical population. If everyone and their mom starts actually using all the bandwidth they pay for, can the ISP deal with that? If you don’t have a monthly data limit, do they start to roll those out to you and your area?
DOCSIS 3.1 is pretty awesome. I heard 4.0 is in testing. Fiber (FttH) is similar to coax in that many subscribers are attached to one head end device. Subscriber throughput is determined by the number of subscribers and the speeds they ordered on the shared resource. Although fiber is leading in total capacity per OLT/PON, it’s not like coax can’t achieve excellence subscriber speeds by just deploying more head end devices with fewer subscribers on each.
Nope, upload fucking sucks. 50 MB/s. It got worse this spring, like 30 Mb/s, so I opened a ticket and a technician came over to calibrate our house connector (?).
Edit: This is due to the provider tho, not the medium. Vodafone (in Germany) is ass but I did not get a successful connection over DSL (the other option, sadly no fiber yet), so I went with them instead.
I reckon it’s been a good ten years since I had a data cap on my home internet. These days I pay £30 a month for unlimited 900mbps fibre and it’s wonderful.
Thank your regulators then. There are very much still a thing. Not because they need to be. But because they allow ISPs to make more money by setting arbitrary limits.
The next flight aim is gonna lean even heavier into streaming. So not just landscape but also plane models will be streamed. So this is gonna get worse not better
Landscape and real time weather data makes sense. Things are changing and it doesnt make sense to have high res textures of the entire planet on users PCs. Or are you just meaning on demand download of the skin?
So that’s about 15 hours before exceeding your Comcast data cap for the month (1.2TB) assuming you don’t use your internet for anything else that month. Then after that it starts costing you about $16/hr to play in data usage alone. ($10 per 50GB)
I live in a monopoly area. My only choice for internet is comcast at 10/5mbps down up and it costs me 180 a month. Two blocks away fiber costs 40 a month.
Wait, so does a single company own all the cabling or something!? We have a despised-for-their-incompetence company called Openreach in Britain but the cables they manage cover almost the entire county and any ISP can use them.
@Intensely_Human is correct. ISPs sign contracts with your city or county (depending on state/province laws) for a designated area. They are the sole provider of one type of Internet there. So you have one cable company and one phone line Internet company. The exception to this is the wireless companies that you buy your cell phone line from. Some cities may allow a second choice in one location but it’s not common outside the largest cities.
From the customer point of view, when you move in you are told what cable company serves your area. Then you have a choice of cable, phone line, satellite, or cell phone. Our government pretends that choice makes it not a monopoly.
Also, municipal run Internet is explicitly banned in many states. So if a town doesn’t like any of the options or no private company will serve the town, they cannot setup their own.
Those are actually just for show. We’ve let like 3 companies buy up all of our grocery stores too.
We’re finding out that anywhere our laws say the government can hold rich people accountable or rich people should do something it actually means they can just do whatever they want. Even the hard line laws like price collusion have gone unenforced for decades now. And now that there is an (a single) enforcement action, it’s a civil suit that’s not even threatening to cost them more than they made.
I watched a couple Of live streams showing a graph for bandwidth as they flew. It tended to spike to around 180 MB a second when whole new areas were loading but during flight it was much much lower at around 10 to 15 MB per second.
Okay so after reading the article, that 150MB/s statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
So first off, that was the fastest they recorded. So they just took that times an hour and said “Whoa if it stayed that sustained for the whole hour it’d be 81GB!!”. Bam, clickbait title achieved. Ad revenue pleeeease
Now, for actual data, it looks like in rural areas it’s about 10mbps and in cities about 100. I’ll just throw it out there, why wpukdnt you want it to stream back as fast as possible?
This is like the same stupid RAM argument. I WANT you to use as much as you can! What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don’t use everything you can?! There is no reason they shouldn’t push it through faster. It’s not more data, it’s not a constant stream of 150MB/s like the garbage title claims, it peaks at 150MB/s. So good. I’m paying for gigabit, use the full pipe. When I’m playing a game that is my number one priority, give it to me as fast as you can.
I’ll just throw it out there, why wpukdnt you want it to stream back as fast as possible?
Speed is not the problem. The problem is the sheer quantity of data needed to play a video game. Some people have data caps. Others may not be able to run the game smoothly, and others still not at all.
This is like the same stupid RAM argument. I WANT you to use as much as you can! What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don’t use everything you can?!
It’s not stupid to not want software consuming more RAM than is necessary.
Seeing how the game isn’t out yet and we don’t know what the settings are, I’m not going to agree with this non-article that it’s always streaming that much data. FS2020 had different settings that you could put in, caching levels, caps, and more. I highly doubt it’s constantly streaming that much.
As for RAM, disagree. In the case of games, it makes no sense to keep reading and writing from disk when there is ram available. Store it in RAM so it can be accessed quickly. The key is if the application releases RAM when the OS requests it to be released, or there is pressure. If I’m playing a game with 4k textures I 100% would rather have as many of them loaded into RAM when playing to make a smoother experience than constantly hitting my disk, which is on the thousands of times slower. I have 64GB just sitting there, I want them to use it.
I’m not going to agree with this non-article that it’s always streaming that much data.
What article are you talking about? The one in the OP doesn’t say that.
Meanwhile, scattered reports of MS Flight Sim 2020’s bandwidth consumption point toward a more conservative ~100 Mb/s in densely populated photogrammetry areas, such as major cities. Usage in lighter areas could dip as low as 10 Mb/s, though the official Microsoft bandwidth recommendation for that game was 50 Mb/s.
My ISP will automatically throttle my house if I was slurping up that much bandwidth. It simply isn’t feasible for most people as ISPs usually throttle speeds when they detect sustained high bandwidth activity.
It’s not just the bandwidth that’s the issue it’s the amount of data as many people have datacaps.
The article says:
official Microsoft bandwidth recommendation for that game was 50 Mb/s.
which comes out to 23GB/hr. That can add up quick. 10 hours in a month equates to 20% of my cap with Comcast.
This also neglects people who live in rural areas that might not even have 50Mbps available and can’t play because MS streams half the game to you rather than include it in the install files.
I will never understand why the United States insists on living about 30 years behind the rest of the planet.
Just because one shitty company has it doesn’t mean they all do. I have Quantum fiber which is 8/8 gbps at my house with no cap. Only costs me 165$ a month.
My cousin in a rural as shit location has fiber as well… 10/10 available for 240$. He currently does 1/1gbps and pays something like 65$
Quantum Fiber is Century Link. They have always throttled for going over a cap. They have always advertised no cap and no throttling. They have always waited for you to call customer service with the speed test receipts several times to come clean about doing so.
Sorry not buying it. You may have had shit experiences with them, but I definitely haven’t. And I definitely don’t believe it’s some overarching hidden policy of theirs.
This month I’ve pushed nearly 100TB… I’ve never once called in for anything other than for them to fix their jank ass CX6500 (Fucking piece of shit, let me use my own SPF+ stick FFS). Although I’m sure I’d be more frustrated if I ever ran into any issues with billing or anything like that.
Last 30 days: 56.85TB download and 40.78TB upload.
Last 7 days: 8.02 TB down, and 6.27 up.
And I can still spawn speedtests/iperfs that hit near my max 8/8…
Even more importantly… Since it would be easy for them to just “not” throttle speedtest.net. I can pull out my phone on cellular network and speedtest against my own speedtesting server and match the speeds my phone gets speedtesting to a normal server (since my phone will never be able to saturate 8gbps anyway, but I still get into the 200-300mbps).
I’ve had users speedtest against my speedtesting server on other networks that were gigabit get those full speeds regularly.
I see those full speeds torrenting regularly. I see them regularly from steam downloads and other sources as well.
man… just commenting on your speed test. i worked tech support for an ISP in the late 90s (probably a lot of us around here did) and it is just stunning how far the speed has come. we had 100mb ethernet in the office and felt like pimps. My comcast down is about 1/7 of yours, and my up is not in parity. I do pay to not have a cap though, so there’s that.
Prior to Quantum coming into the area, I was on Centurylink bonded vDSL. I got 140/25. The only reason I took that over the cox gigablast was because of the lack of data-cap. Higher speeds are useless if I can’t use that speed all the time. The vdsl was more useful at the slower speeds because I could max that lower speed out 24/7 for the whole month if I needed to. 140 at full bore was way more than the 1.2TB cap on coax… (Cox is 1.28TB cap, which you can hit in about 3 hours at full speed… The fuck is the point?)
Though since then… I’ve definitely grown into using much more bandwidth than I used to.
I remember 10mbit thinnet though. Hope you didn’t lose the termination plugs. Connecting more than 2 computers together was awesome. The IPX lan games started nearly immediately. We definitely have come a long way.
While 8/8 is definitely not needed for 99% of people out there… the tired bullshit of 100/20mbps that most people seem to purchase and not even get is definitely not good enough.
Capitalism, an oligarchy that controls major players, and legislation to keep public players out of the game in a lot of places. Even aside from the fact that private companies are able to prevent municipalities from making their own networks, Congress passed taxes to build out a fiber network and let the ISPs do fuck all, to the point that we had been taxed to the tune of $400 BILLION dollars A FUCKING DECADE AGO.
It constantly amazes me the shit our government lets corporations get away with.
I have a gigabit internet plan with Comcast , cost me $80 a month. And yes there is a 1.2tb data cap each month. Every 50gb that you go over, you are automatically charged an additional $10. Oh I’ll just choose another ISP…nope Comcast is the only option in my town. Not unless I want 5G cell Internet or satellite which is not super reliable or fast.
Almost every plan is uncapped, but a few (at least one I know of) does, name the cheapest offering from Moi. But that’s the rare exception and it’s a plan specifically known and tailored to be cheapest of the cheap.
Even on mobile my data cap only counts some of the time. Streaming services are not included.
So I can watch all of the YouTube or Netflix or Disney plus that I want and my data limit never goes anywhere. Basically it’s just for general browsing. Given that the bulk of my usage is streaming my data cap essentially doesn’t exist for me.
Sure, you can turn off data streaming too. It also allows you to cache the data, just like fs2020. My point is that the article makes it about the speed and makes some arbitrary data points. Your data examples are more accurate than theirs. They only presented a worst case scenario, not what will actually happen
What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don’t use everything you can?! There is no reason they shouldn’t push it through faster.
This is the reason why I leave the shower running in every hotel I visit. And at the buffet, I tell the waiter to fetch me a trash can so I can actually get rid of the whole thing. If I can, I usually leave both a heater and an air conditioner running in the hallway.
Edit: Wow. I had completely forgotten about this comment. I really didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. I work with networks. I know we’re not literally going to run out of internet. But everyone treats bandwidth as this freely available resource. Advertisers, consumers, creatives and Jürgen. Fuck you, Jürgen. We both know that downloading 6 fucking MB every time someone wants to queue up the database is fucking insane, as is your reliance on client-side bullshit.
Anyway, whenever a anything loads slowly, think about why. Bandwith is not free. It’s a maintained resource.
Well clearly you drank the Comcast kool-aid. Bandwidth is nothing like clean water supply, food, or generated electricity. It’s more like traffic on a highway. Sure, there is a finite amount of room on the highway, but until you hit that at any one time, there is room on the highway for more traffic.
It could be a problem if everyone was playing flight simulator at the same time but they are not.
None of these are the same comparison. There is no “wasting” Internet speed.
The comparison would be better to turning on the faucet halfway to fill your cup slower. What’s the point. You’re using the same amount of water. Just open it all the way and fill your cup.
The cup doesn’t keep overflowing with data. You’re downloading files, once those files are done downloading it’s done. It’s not like it “forgets” and accidentally downloads the whole internet. What a weird way of thinking the internet works
Because it is accessing petabytes of world data. In the old days, you’d store the world on your PC and they had relatively insane storage requirement. Now it’s just too much. The current MSFS has 300GB of content, but you can download areas of world data on your hard drive to cut down on streaming data in areas you go to often. So a lot people have a 500GB+ drive just for MSFS. This new one is supposed to require much less space.
It’s just using Bing Maps data, which is smart. Not everyone flies at 35,000 feet, low altitude flights look spectacular and are accurate in a way no stored world map could. The terrain is automatically generated from Bing data, not hand modeled. Every building is in the right spot, is the right height, and the exact right shape, and it costs me no storage. It’s an obvious evolution of the genre with all kinds of benefits. Like all airports on earth, even grass landing strips, that are visible in Bing Maps, exist in the game without having to be hand modeled or stored locally. It detects them automatically then plops down an in game runway, tarmac, and taxiways on top of the satellite imagery in the exact shape and size as the real thing. It’s really cool!
But it can be that detailed for nothing, so why not? They own Bing Maps. They already have optional extra high detail for certain areas you can keep on your hard drive, just as you suggest. That’s why some people have a TB of game content. That’s what the new game wants to fix. The Bing stuff fills in the bits that aren’t bespoke. In the new one it streams it all, and most people who actually plays the genre are very pleased about it.
It’s not for nothing. If they keep the ability to have it on your hard drive then that’s fine. But if they don’t, then people are going to be hitting their data caps super easily.
It’s the entire planet, in higher than high def. Every tree, every polygon. We’re not talking on the TB scale, this is on the PB scale. Everything from Azure maps.
Okay I feel like you’re just being glib now. You can fly down to any detail, you can fly down to your own city, fly past your house. You can land on your own street if you want to. It’s the entire globe. You’re not constantly at 30k feet, you can go down and fly around San Francisco, or the Grand Canyon.
Yes… that’s why they have a slider bar for what resolution you want your terrain at? In FS2020 it was a zero to 400 fidelity scale. You’re arguing that the top of the line shouldn’t be top of the line, when there are so many settings that can be tweaked to the user’s preference. An overwhelming number of settings. FS2020 came with presets for what Azure Maps fidelity you wanted if you didn’t want fine tuned controls.
“Meanwhile, scattered reports of **MS Flight Sim 2020’**s bandwidth consumption point toward a more conservative ~100 Mb/s in densely populated photogrammetry areas, such as major cities. Usage in lighter areas could dip as low as 10 Mb/s, though the official Microsoft bandwidth recommendation for that game was 50 Mb/s.”
Flight Sim 2020 had a higher install size and lower bandwidth. Flight Sim 2024 has a lower install size and higher bandwidth requirement. Even if the sustained load isn’t using the maximum bandwidth, it still means that 2024 will use a significant amount of bandwidth such that it may affect customers with data caps.
Why does the terrain take more (much more) bandwidth than a video stream?
And what the heck do you mean they’re “streaming the terrain” surely it would be a one and done date transfer, much smaller than a live video packet stream, that amount of bandwidth is insane, you could do multiple 4k streams.
It is detailed terrain for an entire planet, and figures are at around 10Mbps for just terrain without buildings.
Assuming you’re flying at 800kmh in something like an airbus A380, you’re flying 13.3km each minute, uncovering a large part of a new circle/sphere of terrain with a radius of 13km (half of it overlaps with old already-downloaded terrain). That’s half of 555km squared of terrain. That’s a lot of terrain. If you want that terrain to be fairly accurate, you’ll want to see at least meter accuracy near the plane (if you’re near the ground you’ll want to see one datapoint of terrain per meter or more), with lower levels of detail as you get further away. Add onto that things like the placement of trees, bushes, rocks, and all the texture data of the terrain (probably an index into existing possibly procedural textures), and you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be transferred.
10Mbps seems pretty fair for all of that.
Also terrain data is updated regularly, and you might not want to keep around old terrain in the first place. There are reasons like players only flying some routes once and never again, and if you save all of mozambique for someone who actually only flies around in the US that’s bad too.
EDIT: Buildings of course cost extra. Airports take up a bit of bandwidth each time you take off or land, as they are probably custom modeled. Cities like NY or LA though will have a ton of custom modeled buildings and textures, and those cost a lot of bandwidth.
because 1) the figure in the headline is only the most extreme value they found. 2) the image generated by your GPU is only one perspective of the entire 3D environment. maybe in order to download the area you’re also downloading objects that don’t need to be displayed on your screen yet. And 3) cloud streaming videos are also heavily compressed.
Because it is more data I guess ? Also probably has to use lossless compression, if it can be compressed at all. Whereas video compression algorithms are usually pretty damn lossy
They’re streaming in the 3d world detail, but the rendering engine is installed locally.
Playing on xCloud will just stream in the visuals that are rendered remotely, so a lot less bandwidth, but then you have the lag, and need a subscription.
I was thinking more of uninstalling this 81 GB/hour game and enrolling in flight school (if you have data cap overage fees). But I like the way you think!
Exactly - People don’t seem to realize that cloud gaming responsiveness only really matters in competitive games and shooters. Turn based games or more casual games run perfectly fine with fast Internet.
Or how many ISPs are going to accuse people of illegal internet activity due to constant large data transfers when its literally just a Flight Simulator lol.
The hard cap in my area is 300GB a month, you can only go over twice in a year and its only for 10GB and you pay 50$ each time. If you are over that limit they just shut it off.
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GeForce now uses 20 gigs/hour at the highest quality, how are they not just sending the entire video to your screen, what more do they need to send??
because it takes more data to generate the image than the image itself, especially in highly detailed and dense areas.
In fact, that’s core to the concept of an “image” at the most abstract level
Because game streaming introduces latency and instability, which can be a huge problem in something like a flight sim.
Much less of a problem when all inputs are processed locally, and only the textures and models are being streamed.
3d terrain tile streaming takes a crazy amount of data. it essentially downloads hundreds of png files at a time and overlays them over 3d terrain data. Everytime you move an inch or pan the camera, it pulls down new data.
That seems like a wildly inefficient way to render things
That’s literally how every 3d game works (barring a few procedural games maybe). Now they just stream those texture and meshes as needed and presumably cache them.
Don’t get distracted by this terrible piece of an article. It never states how long this peak was. It could have been just 100ms. So interpolating this to 81gb/h make no sense at all. It’s just pure click bait.
In the end only the total volume downloaded matters (which the article of course doesn’t mention). Why wouldn’t you want to receive that as fast as possible?
it’s not the same. 3d games use polygons and shaders and whatnot. you can optimize things much easier in that space since it’s a lot more computational. 3d tiling is literally a bunch of png files being streamed down.
Yes, just like msfs does. They still use polygons and shaders… Polygons that make up the terrain and more and shaders that sample png tiles as textures… Msfs really does not do anything different than other games, outside of streaming in the assets instead of pre-installing them. Not sure why people think it’s any different.
kinda… graphics all end up as polygons eventually but 3d tile rendering has a lot of different considerations and limitations you don’t have with rendering a normal 3d asset rendering. check out things like CesiumJS that is an equivalent kind of technology
Other games store those png tiles locally. Which, sure, increases the installed size of the game. Storage is cheap though, might as well use it right? Like, even if this article is off by an order of magnitude, 8Gb/h is still a ton of data to stream just to play a video game. If other games also do that, that’s news to me. But i was under the impression that games try to be as efficient as possible when it comes to networking. Storing all your texture tiles in the cloud and making your clients download and redownload them seems the opposite of efficient, or at least that they optimized for the wrong thing.
A highly compressed, global base map at 1m resolution is somewhere on the order of 10TB. MSFS is probably using higher resolution commercial imagery, and that’s just the basemap textures, most of which you’ll never see.
Thats why there is a cache, so you don’t re download every time… So only new locations you visit will be streamed, but it will still be way less than having to pre install maps with locations you might never even visit in game… I don’t get why this is so hard to grasp.
Do you manually download all your maps from google maps/earth every time before you use it? No you don’t, you let the program figure out which parts you actually need and stream it to you. Same exact thing, fot the exact same reason.
So is bandwidth. 8gb/h is only 2mb/s which was maybe a lot 25 years ago. These days you can’t even get a connection slower than 50/100mb/s
Games try to be as efficient possible with their network code for real-time updates, so latency is minimalized. This is not at all important if you prefetch stuff minutes before you actually need it.
K so why not just include that with the initial installation, if you’re gonna need to store it locally anyways?
Or allow users to decide what areas of the map they want to fly in and just download that subset when the user requests it?
Implicitly streaming that much data seems like a good way to piss off your users when they unknowingly saturate their bandwidth or bump up against their data cap.
No, but Google maps doesn’t potentially use gigabytes of data per hour, and isn’t something I use for hours on end multiple times a week like a video game, except in relatively rare occurrences like road trips/vacations.
You pay for storage once and that’s it. You pay a subscription for bandwidth, plus fees if you go over your data cap. Bandwidth is absolutely more expensive than storage, and should be optimized for.
MSFS implements optimizations on top of that (progressive detail, compression, etc), but that’s how almost all map systems work under the hood. It’s actually an efficient way to represent real environments where you don’t have the luxury of procedural generation.
The world they built for the game is hundreds of terabytes, it’s really the only way to do it without forcing players to preload tiny chunks of the world and restrict their flight to only the ones they’ve downloaded.
A lot of isps are rolling out gigabit and even faster internet. Finally having a killer app for it will increase demand for it and shame slower isps to upgrade their old coaxial and copper cables with fiber.
I think the thing to note here is that ISPs roll those things out fully aware that hardly anyone who pays for that will actually USE that amount of data. They don’t want a killer app for it, they just want you to think you need that much data, and then never actually use it. In fact there are some places where regardless of your bandwidth, you have a monthly data allotment. This game represents a shift into super high bandwidth usage for the general non-technical population. If everyone and their mom starts actually using all the bandwidth they pay for, can the ISP deal with that? If you don’t have a monthly data limit, do they start to roll those out to you and your area?
I won’t be upgrading my 50mbit download/10mbit upload 😂
They’ll still cap you at 250 Gb a month.
idk, I upload almost 1TB per day. never gotten notices or anything. fios.
Who cares about shame when you have no competition? In your dreams.
ISPs are unshamable and a flight sim is a niche application.
I get Gigabit over coax tho
DOCSIS 3.1 is pretty awesome. I heard 4.0 is in testing. Fiber (FttH) is similar to coax in that many subscribers are attached to one head end device. Subscriber throughput is determined by the number of subscribers and the speeds they ordered on the shared resource. Although fiber is leading in total capacity per OLT/PON, it’s not like coax can’t achieve excellence subscriber speeds by just deploying more head end devices with fewer subscribers on each.
upload too? cause coax upload sucks ass
Best I can get is 1000/300 which is far from symmetrical but also far from sucking ass.
yeah not bad at all for coax
Nope, upload fucking sucks. 50 MB/s. It got worse this spring, like 30 Mb/s, so I opened a ticket and a technician came over to calibrate our house connector (?).
Edit: This is due to the provider tho, not the medium. Vodafone (in Germany) is ass but I did not get a successful connection over DSL (the other option, sadly no fiber yet), so I went with them instead.
complaining a bout 50MB/s upload is a champagne problem.
I don’t see why it matters though? You’re not gonna be playing the game on your phone with limited data
Because my ISP charges $50/mo extra for the “privilege” of having unlimited data.
My biggest pet peeve is that they sell you a service, at a certain speed, that you can only use for like 50 hours a month…
Mine too.
That’s more than I pay for unlimited gigabit here wtf 😭
‘Land of the free’, init.
I love where I live, but my biggest miss on moving was leaving my fiber network behind and moving to Cox monopoly territory.
I’m in the same boat. Their only competition where I am is DSL, other than 5G/satellite.
That’s insane!
Buddy, today you’re going to learn about data caps.
I reckon it’s been a good ten years since I had a data cap on my home internet. These days I pay £30 a month for unlimited 900mbps fibre and it’s wonderful.
They still a thing? Not sure they’re that common in the UK at least 🤷🏻♂️
Thank your regulators then. There are very much still a thing. Not because they need to be. But because they allow ISPs to make more money by setting arbitrary limits.
this isnt a thing on most countries on earth for “landline” internet.
monopolies in capitalism are brutal, and you guys shouldnt be allowing it.
I agree with you. They’ve even become a level of corporate governance with the whole copyright issue.
My Starlink plan is 50gb per month!
The next flight aim is gonna lean even heavier into streaming. So not just landscape but also plane models will be streamed. So this is gonna get worse not better
Basically Google Stadia
Nah. This is asset streaming. E.g model data. Not video
Well if you are gonna stream something you might as well stream everything if you can. I for one like small install sizes.
What benefit would streaming plane models have?
Landscape and real time weather data makes sense. Things are changing and it doesnt make sense to have high res textures of the entire planet on users PCs. Or are you just meaning on demand download of the skin?
Well if the install size is anything to go by it drops from 120Gb to 30
So that’s about 15 hours before exceeding your Comcast data cap for the month (1.2TB) assuming you don’t use your internet for anything else that month. Then after that it starts costing you about $16/hr to play in data usage alone. ($10 per 50GB)
I keep seeing comcast mentioned, why do you guys across the pond pay for a broadband service with a maximum download amount like it’s a 3G phone?
I live in a monopoly area. My only choice for internet is comcast at 10/5mbps down up and it costs me 180 a month. Two blocks away fiber costs 40 a month.
Wait, so does a single company own all the cabling or something!? We have a despised-for-their-incompetence company called Openreach in Britain but the cables they manage cover almost the entire county and any ISP can use them.
@Intensely_Human is correct. ISPs sign contracts with your city or county (depending on state/province laws) for a designated area. They are the sole provider of one type of Internet there. So you have one cable company and one phone line Internet company. The exception to this is the wireless companies that you buy your cell phone line from. Some cities may allow a second choice in one location but it’s not common outside the largest cities.
From the customer point of view, when you move in you are told what cable company serves your area. Then you have a choice of cable, phone line, satellite, or cell phone. Our government pretends that choice makes it not a monopoly.
Also, municipal run Internet is explicitly banned in many states. So if a town doesn’t like any of the options or no private company will serve the town, they cannot setup their own.
That’s mental
Yup, America, eternally asking the question, “but what about my 10th super yacht?”
180!!! Wtf
In the US, ISPs are government-enforced monopolies.
What exactly does that mean? I thought you had anti-monopoly laws?
Those are actually just for show. We’ve let like 3 companies buy up all of our grocery stores too.
We’re finding out that anywhere our laws say the government can hold rich people accountable or rich people should do something it actually means they can just do whatever they want. Even the hard line laws like price collusion have gone unenforced for decades now. And now that there is an (a single) enforcement action, it’s a civil suit that’s not even threatening to cost them more than they made.
Lol, we had 10-20MB/month packages with 3g…
Because we have no other choice.
Honestly it’s not that bad in most places but certainly there are plenty where data caps are a problem.
That seems excessive
It is. If it’s 140 mbit/s (or 15 MB/s), Flight Simulator only uses 54 GB per hour. OP is confusing bits and bytes.
It’s still a shit load of data.
I watched a couple Of live streams showing a graph for bandwidth as they flew. It tended to spike to around 180 MB a second when whole new areas were loading but during flight it was much much lower at around 10 to 15 MB per second.
Obviously the flight simulator runs in the cloud.
People downvoting you didn’t get the joke.
Their head is up their ass, instead of in the clouds.
Nah planes go wooosh over their heads
Oh they got it.
Okay so after reading the article, that 150MB/s statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.
So first off, that was the fastest they recorded. So they just took that times an hour and said “Whoa if it stayed that sustained for the whole hour it’d be 81GB!!”. Bam, clickbait title achieved. Ad revenue pleeeease
Now, for actual data, it looks like in rural areas it’s about 10mbps and in cities about 100. I’ll just throw it out there, why wpukdnt you want it to stream back as fast as possible?
This is like the same stupid RAM argument. I WANT you to use as much as you can! What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don’t use everything you can?! There is no reason they shouldn’t push it through faster. It’s not more data, it’s not a constant stream of 150MB/s like the garbage title claims, it peaks at 150MB/s. So good. I’m paying for gigabit, use the full pipe. When I’m playing a game that is my number one priority, give it to me as fast as you can.
Speed is not the problem. The problem is the sheer quantity of data needed to play a video game. Some people have data caps. Others may not be able to run the game smoothly, and others still not at all.
It’s not stupid to not want software consuming more RAM than is necessary.
Seeing how the game isn’t out yet and we don’t know what the settings are, I’m not going to agree with this non-article that it’s always streaming that much data. FS2020 had different settings that you could put in, caching levels, caps, and more. I highly doubt it’s constantly streaming that much.
As for RAM, disagree. In the case of games, it makes no sense to keep reading and writing from disk when there is ram available. Store it in RAM so it can be accessed quickly. The key is if the application releases RAM when the OS requests it to be released, or there is pressure. If I’m playing a game with 4k textures I 100% would rather have as many of them loaded into RAM when playing to make a smoother experience than constantly hitting my disk, which is on the thousands of times slower. I have 64GB just sitting there, I want them to use it.
What article are you talking about? The one in the OP doesn’t say that.
My ISP will automatically throttle my house if I was slurping up that much bandwidth. It simply isn’t feasible for most people as ISPs usually throttle speeds when they detect sustained high bandwidth activity.
What ISP? That seems awful.
Every ISP I’ve ever had in America.
I’m sorry that seems awful 😞
Sounds like they need to throttle their payments
Yeah man, all the way to zero, because that’s how much you pay for no internet.
I am fortunate to have the option to switch internet providers.
That is what I was referring to.
Bell Canada. One of 2 of the only options for ISPs in Canada.
I’m sorry that must suck.
It’s not just the bandwidth that’s the issue it’s the amount of data as many people have datacaps.
The article says:
which comes out to 23GB/hr. That can add up quick. 10 hours in a month equates to 20% of my cap with Comcast.
This also neglects people who live in rural areas that might not even have 50Mbps available and can’t play because MS streams half the game to you rather than include it in the install files.
Also *Mb/s not MB/s
Just to be clear. Comcast which is a major ISP for the United States has data caps?
I will never understand why the United States insists on living about 30 years behind the rest of the planet.
Insane isnt it, my cousin got a roaming charge driving across his own country.
Wait what, that’s insane! I can roam over the entire EU (probably EEA too) without roaming charges.
Yeah they get reamed on roaming, speeds and data caps on top of it. Its crazy.
They be like “we earn more” and then also have to pay 12000 for medical insurance, 1000 for terrible internet and then a host of localised taxes.
Just because one shitty company has it doesn’t mean they all do. I have Quantum fiber which is 8/8 gbps at my house with no cap. Only costs me 165$ a month.
My cousin in a rural as shit location has fiber as well… 10/10 available for 240$. He currently does 1/1gbps and pays something like 65$
Quantum Fiber is Century Link. They have always throttled for going over a cap. They have always advertised no cap and no throttling. They have always waited for you to call customer service with the speed test receipts several times to come clean about doing so.
Sorry not buying it. You may have had shit experiences with them, but I definitely haven’t. And I definitely don’t believe it’s some overarching hidden policy of theirs.
This month I’ve pushed nearly 100TB… I’ve never once called in for anything other than for them to fix their jank ass CX6500 (Fucking piece of shit, let me use my own SPF+ stick FFS). Although I’m sure I’d be more frustrated if I ever ran into any issues with billing or anything like that.
Last 30 days: 56.85TB download and 40.78TB upload.
Last 7 days: 8.02 TB down, and 6.27 up.
And I can still spawn speedtests/iperfs that hit near my max 8/8…
Even more importantly… Since it would be easy for them to just “not” throttle speedtest.net. I can pull out my phone on cellular network and speedtest against my own speedtesting server and match the speeds my phone gets speedtesting to a normal server (since my phone will never be able to saturate 8gbps anyway, but I still get into the 200-300mbps).
I’ve had users speedtest against my speedtesting server on other networks that were gigabit get those full speeds regularly.
I see those full speeds torrenting regularly. I see them regularly from steam downloads and other sources as well.
man… just commenting on your speed test. i worked tech support for an ISP in the late 90s (probably a lot of us around here did) and it is just stunning how far the speed has come. we had 100mb ethernet in the office and felt like pimps. My comcast down is about 1/7 of yours, and my up is not in parity. I do pay to not have a cap though, so there’s that.
Prior to Quantum coming into the area, I was on Centurylink bonded vDSL. I got 140/25. The only reason I took that over the cox gigablast was because of the lack of data-cap. Higher speeds are useless if I can’t use that speed all the time. The vdsl was more useful at the slower speeds because I could max that lower speed out 24/7 for the whole month if I needed to. 140 at full bore was way more than the 1.2TB cap on coax… (Cox is 1.28TB cap, which you can hit in about 3 hours at full speed… The fuck is the point?)
Though since then… I’ve definitely grown into using much more bandwidth than I used to.
I remember 10mbit thinnet though. Hope you didn’t lose the termination plugs. Connecting more than 2 computers together was awesome. The IPX lan games started nearly immediately. We definitely have come a long way. While 8/8 is definitely not needed for 99% of people out there… the tired bullshit of 100/20mbps that most people seem to purchase and not even get is definitely not good enough.
Then I don’t know where you live with century link but if that’s true it’s the one blessed place they don’t do it.
Capitalism, an oligarchy that controls major players, and legislation to keep public players out of the game in a lot of places. Even aside from the fact that private companies are able to prevent municipalities from making their own networks, Congress passed taxes to build out a fiber network and let the ISPs do fuck all, to the point that we had been taxed to the tune of $400 BILLION dollars A FUCKING DECADE AGO.
It constantly amazes me the shit our government lets corporations get away with.
I have a gigabit internet plan with Comcast , cost me $80 a month. And yes there is a 1.2tb data cap each month. Every 50gb that you go over, you are automatically charged an additional $10. Oh I’ll just choose another ISP…nope Comcast is the only option in my town. Not unless I want 5G cell Internet or satellite which is not super reliable or fast.
Depends on where you live, most places Comcast just has soft caps.
The US is actually moving further back. Data caps are a newer thing.
You can force a download of it, just be prepared for the massive install size, which also won’t help the people with data caps.
You can pause large game downloads and pick them up again later.
I mean, assuming you’re using the maximum recommended bandwidth 100% of the time…? Doesn’t seem very realistic.
Many countries don’t have data caps on broadband.
*Most
Wasn’t even aware it was still a thing, apart from on mobile (where it somewhat makes sense-ish)
My friend says they don’t have data caps on mobile in Finland.
Almost every plan is uncapped, but a few (at least one I know of) does, name the cheapest offering from Moi. But that’s the rare exception and it’s a plan specifically known and tailored to be cheapest of the cheap.
Even on mobile my data cap only counts some of the time. Streaming services are not included.
So I can watch all of the YouTube or Netflix or Disney plus that I want and my data limit never goes anywhere. Basically it’s just for general browsing. Given that the bulk of my usage is streaming my data cap essentially doesn’t exist for me.
Sounds civilized and competitive.
Sure, you can turn off data streaming too. It also allows you to cache the data, just like fs2020. My point is that the article makes it about the speed and makes some arbitrary data points. Your data examples are more accurate than theirs. They only presented a worst case scenario, not what will actually happen
150Mb/s, way different than 150MB/s…
This is why I prefer MB/s and Mbit/s it’s less ambiguous.
Or use octals -> 1Mo/s = 1MB/s = 8Mb/s
No risk of confusion.
1 MB ≠ 1MiB though.
This is the reason why I leave the shower running in every hotel I visit. And at the buffet, I tell the waiter to fetch me a trash can so I can actually get rid of the whole thing. If I can, I usually leave both a heater and an air conditioner running in the hallway.
Edit: Wow. I had completely forgotten about this comment. I really didn’t think anyone would take it seriously. I work with networks. I know we’re not literally going to run out of internet. But everyone treats bandwidth as this freely available resource. Advertisers, consumers, creatives and Jürgen. Fuck you, Jürgen. We both know that downloading 6 fucking MB every time someone wants to queue up the database is fucking insane, as is your reliance on client-side bullshit.
Anyway, whenever a anything loads slowly, think about why. Bandwith is not free. It’s a maintained resource.
Well clearly you drank the Comcast kool-aid. Bandwidth is nothing like clean water supply, food, or generated electricity. It’s more like traffic on a highway. Sure, there is a finite amount of room on the highway, but until you hit that at any one time, there is room on the highway for more traffic.
It could be a problem if everyone was playing flight simulator at the same time but they are not.
None of these are the same comparison. There is no “wasting” Internet speed.
The comparison would be better to turning on the faucet halfway to fill your cup slower. What’s the point. You’re using the same amount of water. Just open it all the way and fill your cup.
The cup doesn’t keep overflowing with data. You’re downloading files, once those files are done downloading it’s done. It’s not like it “forgets” and accidentally downloads the whole internet. What a weird way of thinking the internet works
Why is it using the Internet anyways? Storage is cheap. They’re selling 12 TB hard drives. What do I care if FS2024 is an entire TB?
Because it is accessing petabytes of world data. In the old days, you’d store the world on your PC and they had relatively insane storage requirement. Now it’s just too much. The current MSFS has 300GB of content, but you can download areas of world data on your hard drive to cut down on streaming data in areas you go to often. So a lot people have a 500GB+ drive just for MSFS. This new one is supposed to require much less space.
And with 12 terabytes on a 250 dollar hard drive, why do I care about 500 gigabytes?
If they’re using petabytes of data for flyover territory then they’ve already lost their goddamn minds.
It’s just using Bing Maps data, which is smart. Not everyone flies at 35,000 feet, low altitude flights look spectacular and are accurate in a way no stored world map could. The terrain is automatically generated from Bing data, not hand modeled. Every building is in the right spot, is the right height, and the exact right shape, and it costs me no storage. It’s an obvious evolution of the genre with all kinds of benefits. Like all airports on earth, even grass landing strips, that are visible in Bing Maps, exist in the game without having to be hand modeled or stored locally. It detects them automatically then plops down an in game runway, tarmac, and taxiways on top of the satellite imagery in the exact shape and size as the real thing. It’s really cool!
But they can pack that down and create regions. That doesn’t need to be at super high definition for the entire globe.
But it can be that detailed for nothing, so why not? They own Bing Maps. They already have optional extra high detail for certain areas you can keep on your hard drive, just as you suggest. That’s why some people have a TB of game content. That’s what the new game wants to fix. The Bing stuff fills in the bits that aren’t bespoke. In the new one it streams it all, and most people who actually plays the genre are very pleased about it.
It’s not for nothing. If they keep the ability to have it on your hard drive then that’s fine. But if they don’t, then people are going to be hitting their data caps super easily.
It’s the entire planet, in higher than high def. Every tree, every polygon. We’re not talking on the TB scale, this is on the PB scale. Everything from Azure maps.
In higher than high def? While you’re at 30k feet?
Ever look out a plane window?
What the fuck are they rendering?
Okay I feel like you’re just being glib now. You can fly down to any detail, you can fly down to your own city, fly past your house. You can land on your own street if you want to. It’s the entire globe. You’re not constantly at 30k feet, you can go down and fly around San Francisco, or the Grand Canyon.
Okay and? They’re still delivering at a higher resolution than most people can or want to achieve.
This is absolutely ridiculous, even for that mission statement.
Yes… that’s why they have a slider bar for what resolution you want your terrain at? In FS2020 it was a zero to 400 fidelity scale. You’re arguing that the top of the line shouldn’t be top of the line, when there are so many settings that can be tweaked to the user’s preference. An overwhelming number of settings. FS2020 came with presets for what Azure Maps fidelity you wanted if you didn’t want fine tuned controls.
So they aren’t streaming graphics at higher than high def then. Which means it likely fits on modern hard drives just fine.
You are mixing up the different values.
“Meanwhile, scattered reports of **MS Flight Sim 2020’**s bandwidth consumption point toward a more conservative ~100 Mb/s in densely populated photogrammetry areas, such as major cities. Usage in lighter areas could dip as low as 10 Mb/s, though the official Microsoft bandwidth recommendation for that game was 50 Mb/s.”
Flight Sim 2020 had a higher install size and lower bandwidth. Flight Sim 2024 has a lower install size and higher bandwidth requirement. Even if the sustained load isn’t using the maximum bandwidth, it still means that 2024 will use a significant amount of bandwidth such that it may affect customers with data caps.
Are they streaming it to you??
Wait that would actually take FAR LESS DATA
They don’t stream a video feed to you, they stream the terrain to you
Why does the terrain take more (much more) bandwidth than a video stream?
And what the heck do you mean they’re “streaming the terrain” surely it would be a one and done date transfer, much smaller than a live video packet stream, that amount of bandwidth is insane, you could do multiple 4k streams.
It is detailed terrain for an entire planet, and figures are at around 10Mbps for just terrain without buildings.
Assuming you’re flying at 800kmh in something like an airbus A380, you’re flying 13.3km each minute, uncovering a large part of a new circle/sphere of terrain with a radius of 13km (half of it overlaps with old already-downloaded terrain). That’s half of 555km squared of terrain. That’s a lot of terrain. If you want that terrain to be fairly accurate, you’ll want to see at least meter accuracy near the plane (if you’re near the ground you’ll want to see one datapoint of terrain per meter or more), with lower levels of detail as you get further away. Add onto that things like the placement of trees, bushes, rocks, and all the texture data of the terrain (probably an index into existing possibly procedural textures), and you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be transferred.
10Mbps seems pretty fair for all of that.
Also terrain data is updated regularly, and you might not want to keep around old terrain in the first place. There are reasons like players only flying some routes once and never again, and if you save all of mozambique for someone who actually only flies around in the US that’s bad too.
EDIT: Buildings of course cost extra. Airports take up a bit of bandwidth each time you take off or land, as they are probably custom modeled. Cities like NY or LA though will have a ton of custom modeled buildings and textures, and those cost a lot of bandwidth.
because 1) the figure in the headline is only the most extreme value they found. 2) the image generated by your GPU is only one perspective of the entire 3D environment. maybe in order to download the area you’re also downloading objects that don’t need to be displayed on your screen yet. And 3) cloud streaming videos are also heavily compressed.
Because it is more data I guess ? Also probably has to use lossless compression, if it can be compressed at all. Whereas video compression algorithms are usually pretty damn lossy
The current Microsoft Flight Sim is gigantic. My install folder is upwards of 300 GB and I’m missing a few terrain updates
They’re streaming in the 3d world detail, but the rendering engine is installed locally.
Playing on xCloud will just stream in the visuals that are rendered remotely, so a lot less bandwidth, but then you have the lag, and need a subscription.
At this point you might as well stream the game video, it would be less bandwidth.
This guy just invented Google Stadia (and GeForce Now I think)
Nobody remembers OnLive…
… who?
Steve Perlman
Steve Perlman sure does
I remember OnLive. I was waiting for it to become usable, then…nothing.
Doesn’t it already run on Gamepass xCloud whatever they call it?
It wouldn’t be as responsive though.
Just fly Boeing in game. It’s a more authentic experience that way.
If the experience you’re after is a near death experience, sure.
Well they do have the whistleblower expansion pack too if flying the plane isn’t near death enough for ya
Ah yes, the Flight Simulator and Hitman crossover expansion.
If you have small data caps, it may even be cheaper.
Don’t have to render doors if they’ve fallen off
I was thinking more of uninstalling this 81 GB/hour game and enrolling in flight school (if you have data cap overage fees). But I like the way you think!
It’s hardly Counterstrike.
Well if you think it works well there is nothing stopping you for streaming the game with xcloud.
Imo experience the bitrate and latency is pretty poor even with gigabit internet.
Exactly - People don’t seem to realize that cloud gaming responsiveness only really matters in competitive games and shooters. Turn based games or more casual games run perfectly fine with fast Internet.
What!? Why the games don’t just run locally
they’re streaming world data. I shudder to think about the size of the entire dataset.
Are the streamed data stored in a local cache? Surely the bandwidth costs are going up to the sky with the server sending data to every single player.
From what I’ve heard, yes. They’re storing data in cache for frequently charted areas
Cant wait for how many flight nerds are about to find out about their comcast data caps.
Or how many ISPs are going to accuse people of illegal internet activity due to constant large data transfers when its literally just a Flight Simulator lol.
It’s public domain music and Linux, I swear!
ISPs won’t even notice. They don’t care about big upload/download unless it’s continuous, affecting other users, or they get a legal notice.
Not the case for everyone. I’m regularly throttled watching a long 4k movie on Netflix or trying to download a big game from Steam.
your isp already knows youre streamin nonsense from microsoft. this wont trigger anything
Unless you run a VPN
must be some great vpn pushin 180Mb/s
So Comcast users can’t have youtube tv?
The hard cap in my area is 300GB a month, you can only go over twice in a year and its only for 10GB and you pay 50$ each time. If you are over that limit they just shut it off.