Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — equivalent to 81GB of data per hour
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — equivalent to 81GB of data per hour
At least that install size is light, right?
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.
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.
Also *Mb/s not MB/s
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
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.
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.
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
Obviously the flight simulator runs in the cloud.
People downvoting you didn't get the joke.
Nah planes go wooosh over their heads
Their head is up their ass, instead of in the clouds.
Oh they got it.
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.
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.
At this point you might as well stream the game video, it would be less bandwidth.
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.
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
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.
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?
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.
ISPs are unshamable and a flight sim is a niche application.
Who cares about shame when you have no competition? In your dreams.
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?
They'll still cap you at 250 Gb a month.
idk, I upload almost 1TB per day. never gotten notices or anything. fios.
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.
I won't be upgrading my 50mbit download/10mbit upload 😂
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.
I don't get it; what do you think they're doing?
Like game streaming, vs streaming cloud data, because the data is already based in azure.
My gut feeling? Probably something nafarious.
My proof? Decades of feeling like people were up to shady shit. Being told I have no proof, and to shut up, and then they later prove it was shady shit.
But hey, that 2003 Iraqi invasion TOTALLY saved the world from a nuclear blast, right? It couldn't have just been a series of government lies. The government wouldn't start a war, and kill young 18 year old men without a clear and proven threat, and have a solid plan in place to end that threat.
I'm 41 years old. I was two weeks away from turning 18 when 9/11 happened. By 2002 I smelled something fishy. I told my friends not to sign up to serve. I told them something was up. I was called a coward, and that George Bush was the president of the USA. He wouldn't lie to the nation about something so serious.
And now, 20+ years later, I'd just like to tell you how we still find the time to get together a few times a year, share some beers, and laugh about how wrong they were. How foolish they felt when Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how during the Obama years it was leaked that the Bush administration even knew it was bullshit at the time they said it.
I'd LIKE to tell you we do that...but they're all dead. Some killed in action, others came back with PTSD and killed themself. The end result is the same. I grew up from kindergarten through high school with boys that became men, and always were my brothers. Now I have half a dozen anniversary dates that I visit gravestones.
Ok, granted I got off track and forgot what the topic was. This game isn't that serious. But I still smell something up. It's probably running a crypto mine rig on your CPU in the background or some data harvesting farm, or something.
Again, no proof, but I smell bullshit.
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.
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?
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
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
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.
I don't see why it matters though? You're not gonna be playing the game on your phone with limited data
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.
My Starlink plan is 50gb per month!
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