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?
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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
Many countries don't have data caps on broadband.
Wasn't even aware it was still a thing, apart from on mobile (where it somewhat makes sense-ish)
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.
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.
*Most
Sounds civilized and competitive.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 $400 BILLION dollars A FUCKING DECADE AGO.
It constantly amazes me the shit our government lets corporations get away with.
I will never understand why the United States insists on living about 30 years behind the rest of the planet.
Just because one shitty company has it doesn't mean they all do. I have Quantum fiber which is 8/8 gbps at my house with no cap. Only costs me 165$ 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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Correct. FS2020 had many different settings. You could have sweet ultrahd graphics streamed from azure, or you could do many lower qualities, or even pure offline as well. I'm guessing this will have similar options. Which is why I think this article is clickbait. Yes, it can stream that much from Azure - that doesn't mean it's required to.
See that's something I wish you would have led with. That's way more common sense.
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