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.
Oh they got it.
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…
I remember OnLive. I was waiting for it to become usable, then…nothing.
… who?
Steve Perlman
Steve Perlman sure does
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 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!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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
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 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.
They’ll still cap you at 250 Gb a month.
idk, I upload almost 1TB per day. never gotten notices or anything. fios.
I won’t be upgrading my 50mbit download/10mbit upload 😂
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?
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.
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.
The current Microsoft Flight Sim is gigantic. My install folder is upwards of 300 GB and I’m missing a few terrain updates
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 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
I don’t get it; what do you think they’re doing?
GeForce now streams the entire game to you, it takes a few mb/s, barely more than YouTube.
Microsoft could stream an entire game screen to you for far less bandwidth, so what are they actually sending to your machine?
continuing in https://lemmy.world/comment/12892907
GeForce now does not stream the entire game to you. That’s the whole point of GeForce now, it just streams you the final render. Which is just 1 image, though at 60 per second. Which is way less than all the terrain data, textures, meshes, etc in multiple square kms of map data. Ever wonder why modern AAA games are 90+gb big? Thats all the assets that Microsoft streams to you in their flight sim. The actual code is only a few 10’s/100’s mb. Now imagine an AAA game that covers the whole earth and how much space those assets would take up. Hence why they have to stream it to you to make you even capable of playing this game.
They do not have to stream it. PC hard drives come in the multiples of TB these days.
What makes you think it isn’t an option? Most people probably aren’t using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren’t going to come near 95% of it.
You have to download it anyway. If you have the space you can probably specify a high cache volume. Then after a while the streaming would slow down. So whether you download it upfront or during gameplay. In the end it’s more or less the same amount of data. So the whole data cap point is pretty moot. Unless your storage is low and it keeps clearing the cache. But then you wouldn’t be able to play in the other situation at all, or very limited.
And let’s be fair, if your ISP has a data cap less that 10s of TB (or at all) they are scamming you big time. Yay for monopolies eh?
Edit: Thinking about it, streaming the data probably would cause a lower data usage as they can apply LOD tricks and culling, etc. Which they wouldn’t be able to do when you have to pre-download it.
Unpacking compressed files will always be cheaper in Internet usage. And if they wanted to go this direction they could have just streamed the output for far cheaper usage as well.
They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.
First of all, the textures probably are already compressed, so compressing them more doesn’t do all that much. Secondly, streaming is just downloading, so you can just compress the stream. Sure you might lose a little bit of compression possibility when you don’t present it as one big archive. But that probably saves way less than the tricks I mentioned before.
They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.
No they did not, you have to download it either way… And streaming the render output is not at all the same as rendering locally on your own PC. Neither as an user experience nor as a cost benefit for Microsoft.
Why is that surprising? A compressed video stream is obviously smaller than actual textures and mesh data of the entire planet. You can’t compare the two.
Also NVidia doesn’t produce the stream out of thin air. They are running the game on their own servers then compress the final image and send it to you over the net. While MS sends you the actual game data like meshes and textures and you compute the screen image on your own machine. It’s not the same. What Nvidia is doing is expensive since for every client that connects they need a graphics card, a cpu and a SSD running in a server farm. If MS would do it that way you have to pay a subscription fee to play Flight Simulator. What MS does is just sending files. Since bandwidth is obviously exponentially cheaper than spinning up an instance of the game on a server for every customer they’ve decided to do it this way. So you only have to pay once.
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.
Well then you shouldn’t have gotten rid of the big bacon classic! That would be like McDonalds getting rid of the BIG MAC, and replacing it with the double quarter pounder with cheese…except no condiments or toppings besides 8oz of BIG MAC sauce, and calling it the “MAC ATTACK”.
AND WTF HAPPENED TO YOUR SPICY CHICKEN??? ITS LIKE HALF THE SIZE NOW! LIKE AN OVER GROWN CHICKEN NUGGET!
I haven’t had Wendy’s in at least a decade. You are telling me that they destroyed the spicy chicken sandwich. Maybe the best fast food sandwich of all time? This is a shock to me that I might not recover from.
Its so small now. It’s so unfufilling.
Well, I can’t conceive anything other than streaming 4K satellite terrain data that could take up that much data and be nefarious. This is download activity, not upload, so I don’t see it being like a botnet or something.
How much upload activity is there?
30
But how much data does it take to send terrain information? Why not just send the picture of the terrain every moment (stream it) rather than whatever they’re doing?
That would require Microsoft to do something like running a 1:1 local render of everything the player is doing in their sim, for everyone playing the game, at all times. And then they’d have to stream that video feed to the player and somehow make sure the elsewhere-rendered terrain is synced up perfectly with the player’s local game. Doesn’t really seem reasonable.
But the bandwidth has to be more expensive in the long run…
Probably not more expensive than the immense computing power they would need to support something like the method I mentioned. I’m quite sure they’ve done a cost analysis on this lol.
Because it’s 3D? Have you seen the advertizements?
Data vs compute
It’s easy to send all the data in an x mile radius of the players position. Or to identify the players position, speed, camera angle, etc. render it all, compress it, and then send the computer, rendered, video fees.
But obviously they’re taking the more bandwidth intense route, that must cost them more money…
Because it requires computing power from the GPU to translate the terrain into an image of the terrain. They’re using your local GPU for that since GPUs are expensive, and also it minimizes latency between control input and view update. If you turn the camera you want that new view immediately, not 200ms later.
I smell copypasta.
i don’t think that’s appropriate for such deeply-invigorated trauma
Dude. What?
I think he’s 's onto it that people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator are actually flying real life drones and bombing civilians without knowing, just like in Ender’s Game.
Time will tell
I need some of whatever he’s smoking
You mean like in Toys
Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?
Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.
So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.
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.
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
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?”
There’s other options, but they’re all MUCH slower. If you want a different ISP with comparable or faster speeds, you need to move. In my case, internet is bundled with HOA fees. And there is no other fast option available at my address anyway.
So why don’t other ISPs offer comparable speeds in the same location?
Short simplified answer: nobody wants to pay for the infrastructure. Especially in the last mile. There’s probably a Planet Money episode about it. If not, there should be.
I’m guessing the ISPs aren’t forced to share their cables with other ISPs then?
Over here we have “fibre to the kerb” for people whose houses aren’t fully supported yet, meaning it’s fast fibre-optic cable all the way to somewhere near your house, then it uses your existing copper wires for the last bit. It’s not at fast as proper fibre-optic but still a lot better than old copper wires.
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.
It’s not a full monopoly. You can choose another ISP, but it’s just that in practice you’d need to physically move to a new location to make that change of vendor.
That’s a full monopoly.
Why are you bickering with me about it? I don’t appreciate people asking questions in bad faith just so they can make a spicy comment. Think I like it?
There are choices, it’s just they all suck unless you’re willing to move. Nobody’s arguing that it is a local semi-monopoly.
I’m not the guy you responded to, I’m just pointing out that it is a full monopoly. Which is important because part of the story they sell is that the ability to pay thousands of dollars in moving costs is a reasonable cost of switching providers. We’re never going to get the situation changed if we don’t acknowledge that it’s a full monopoly, complete with rent seeking.
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Lol, we had 10-20MB/month packages with 3g…
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
Well if you are gonna stream something you might as well stream everything if you can. I for one like small install sizes.
Basically Google Stadia
Nah. This is asset streaming. E.g model data. Not video
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
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