News Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — equivalent to 81GB of data per hour

[USAFRet]

Never played/used Microsoft Flight Simulator. Why isn't this installed on the PC instead of streaming it?

Because it is a LOT of data. People bitched.
And, it is no use to have data for Europe/Russia/China, if you never fly there.
Wait until you do, and then bring down that data from the interwebs.

 

[YSCCC]

Never played/used Microsoft Flight Simulator. Why isn't this installed on the PC instead of streaming it?

Coz you will need petabytes of data to be installed and updated, daily....

in FS2020, you actually get a BASE game of around 100GB, and purchased addon/free addon accumulated from 2020 till now easily exceed another 100GB installed. then the streaming gets things like latest Bing Satellite photo for photogrammerty, plus more importantly, live weather, it simulates the wind direction and speed pretty well in the big picture so you could kinda fly in real time weather conditions (Surely, that is much less precise than a real hurricane simulation but good enough for some to enjoy some windshear or so), I myself once a while will fly into the hurricans and try land there in unsafe real life conditions.

For 2024, it seems that they have added in even more data to be streamed, including the friction changes of various surfaces, hopefully including the effects of snow and ice, so planes don't brake like they are in dry tarmac in snow. If they could improve the dynamic nature of the world better, streaming from a crazy large server is inevitable

 

[Makaveli]

It's obvious you have to stream the data in. FS2020 accessed over 2 petabytes of world data, 2024 has even higher resolution maps and newer data. Whether they just allow streaming at a higher-res from the same dataset compared to 2020 hasn't been defined.

As an avid flight simmer since the early 90s, I've always made sure my computer has the resources it needs for each new version. My FS2020 install, with cache, addons, etc, sits around 1.5TB. I've got several TB available on NVMe that could be dedicated when I switch over to 2024. I like the option of being able to pre-download areas and never have to stream that data back in again.

Also, Google Fiber and other uncapped fiber ISPs FTW. I cannot fathom a world of being back under datacaps again. It's almost like the days when you could buy 400 or 1000 texts for the month, and if you go over, big overage charges.

I agree with your post.

I'm also a fiber user sadly not everyone has access to it.

 

[ekio]

There will be a custom amount of cache to avoid downloading over and over.

 

[Co BIY]

Detailed modeling of the entire planet IS a lot of data.

But your plane shouldn't need it all at once.

 

[YSCCC]

But your plane shouldn't need it all at once.

That's precisely where all the streaming comes from. keep updating your local data of terrain, weather etc. Flight simmers runs a lot of 4-8 hrs flight and you can't keep loading the whole continent across your flight plan before starting

 

[abufrejoval]

My problems started the minute M$ tried to imply that you'd be able to explore the world with FS, not just flying.

Because that was a lie for many releases, very eggregiously for 2020 and there is zero chance it will change for the 2024 variant.

Because Microsoft simply doesn't have the data.

...

What is kind of interesting these days is that the faux renderings of buildings is precisely repeated: some barn converted into an iconic Hamburg harbor storehouse in a field where I take my daily walks has remained that, for years now, while the rather special cluster of stately buildings where I live remained the same lowly hovels it came up with at the same time.

It will try to assign a template bulding style to a neighbourhood using probably an US bias where property developments are often done in a set style on a green field. But in war ravaged Europe, random bomb placements decided the fate of many neighborhoods, often building by building, so the applied uniformity bears little relation to the style chaos that came from how things really evolved. And if there is a certain uniformity, e.g. because of available building materials or a certain time period and style, it's not picking that up, which an AI might do rather well.

But there is no AI in place on either end, just random number generators with strictly repeatable results which are completely wrong, except outlines (which is all they have, evidently).

And while they might be tempted to convert that into stylistically image models in the next round, even those need half-way precise inputs to come up with half-way believable outputs: while those would still be lies, even if they looked better.

And I'm sure we'd see those in Bing Maps first.

I wouldn't gripe half as much if they didn't vastly oversell.

But they do offer FS as an arm chair travelling tool, which clearly it cannot be. And the press should call that lie, not repeat it.

P.S. I can't believe it's anywhere near realistic in flight simulation either. I haven't crashed a simulated plane in ages and that's clearly unrealistic given zero practical pilot training.

 

[bit_user]

P.S. I also have a gigabit fiber link for data and gave it 32GB for map storage.

Based on what others have said, you probably should increase that by anywhere from 10x to 50x. If you have a spare NVMe slot, you might just add a QLC drive with good read performance for it. For a rig so high-end as yours, that shouldn't be unreasonable.

 

[abufrejoval]

Based on what others have said, you probably should increase that by anywhere from 10x to 50x. If you have a spare NVMe slot, you might just add a QLC drive with good read performance for it. For a rig so high-end as yours, that shouldn't be unreasonable.

Where a cache flips efficiency vs. size is hard to tell, if you don't know the algorithms behind: eventually it could add latency if it became too big and wasn't properly managed.

I got plenty of PCIe v4 NVMe (dual WD850X 4TB on that machine), so I could add a TB or two if I felt that would do any good. I just went initially with 10x what it had set on its own and I'll freely admit that 32GB seems puny on a system with 96GB of RAM (Zen 4 doesn't like quad RAM modules like Zen 3 did).

But it really doesn't make a difference in terms of quality of the data, especially when you're just staying with a certain area and it would have downloaded it all long ago. I'm not observing significant Internet traffic flow when FS is running, just what it's using for ATC text to speech I guess.

With Microsoft cancelling Mixed Reality, my HP Reverb Pro headset is going into forced retirement next year so I've been testing a Meta Quest 3 to see if it holds up to a similar level of visual quality: the raw data specs seem to imply so, but only with a cabled (USB3) connection the quality of the video stream seems within a similar range... And I think the Reverb still looks better, while it's also lighter without a battery or much (unneeded) intelligence inside the headset for sit-down VR.

I hate having to spend the extra €500 for no real benefit except a new lease of life, but that's just another M$ gripe.
And I've already bought nearly every Oculus since the DK1.

Anyhow, during the last week I've flown around the airport, the big city next, and my house on the other side extensively to test the various render quality settings and it's got all available data in the cache already, which just stays abysmal in quality.

And it's the very same data and false renderings it was since the last time I tried a few months ago, after upgrading from the 5950X to a 7950X3D, which did quite a bit for the outside world rendering speed on the RTX 4090: finally all technical limits were removed, only to show the ugly truth in high-resolution and quality motion detail...

M$ just doesn't have the data and it's clearly visible on Bing vs Google Maps, nothing software or hardware can fix.

And it became truly comical when I tried to fly over my French branch office in Lyon, only to find it being converted into an old factory building when I got close: interesting to see how the city transformed in three or four decades, but not the experience I was looking for! And in the Paris office they got the outline right, but the visual representation had nothing to do with how it actually looks. If it's not an outright hand-crafted landmark, it's a piss poor guestimate.

And for those landmarks, Google street view does a much better job, especially in VR.

No I don't particularly like Google (quite the opposite, really), but in this case they quite simply have the only data set (in select regions) which might be able to deliver what M$ tries to sell.

 

[Grindathotte]

I don't think this is continuous, it is just spikes in download speed. Actual data rates per hour would be very much lower.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

And this game will single handedly bring datscaps to FiOS and the currently exempt states for Crapcast. And those that have a data cap, this will kill it in just a few 1 hour sessions, nevermind other normal use.

Also what the hell kind of data line do they have going to the servers running this? Imagine just 100 players at once. That would bog a Gigabit pipr, they would need so many redundant connections, I don't know how this could be profitable or feasible.

This will also never be able to be played offline once the servers go down. A straight line from the farthest point West in California to the farthest point East in Maine in 7 hours.
That's 567GB just for what you see in that straight line.

For the USA alone, thats roughly 3.8 MILLION(!) Square Miles (or for our friends across the pond that use a system that makes sense 9.8 Mil. KM).

That is 307,000,000 GB or 307.8 PB (Petabytes) or 0.3078 EB (Exabytes).
This makes it impossible to ever play offline. And I only calculated the USA. Now figure the rest of the world.

 

[oofdragon]

Fly around certain places too much and get a visit from the FBI.

Lol those certain places are not in the game

 

[Mancastle82]

most ISP in states have data caps (usually 1.2TB)...this game would actually let you hit that cap every month and thats ignoring any other data usage..

Really? I live in Tennessee and have never had a data cap. I’ve had Spectrum and now have TDS fiber internet and no data cap. If I did I’d be in trouble with wife and kids and all devices constantly streaming and gaming etc.

 

[bit_user]

Also what the hell kind of data line do they have going to the servers running this? Imagine just 100 players at once. That would bog a Gigabit pipr, they would need so many redundant connections, I don't know how this could be profitable or feasible.

You've never heard of a CDN?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network
​

 

[DawesLimit]

I rather have it cache then stream from local storage than be constantly stream from cloud. Local storage is cheap. Even spinning drive can sustain 80-125 MB/s or equivalent to 1 Gb/s of internet dl speed.

 

[SyCoREAPER]

You've never heard of a CDN?

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network​

​

That's fair but then there's extra costs for each site, data, etc which actually will be more expensive as regional power costs vary. They need to rent rackspace if they dont have their own dedicated data centers.
Oh and the load on those things? AC for those servers will insane.

All that aside, a CDN wouldn't solve the EOL aspect of playing offline when the day comes. That's why I hate server side games, especially ones at full price.

 

[bit_user]

I rather have it cache then stream from local storage than be constantly stream from cloud. Local storage is cheap. Even spinning drive can sustain 80-125 MB/s or equivalent to 1 Gb/s of internet dl speed.

But you don't want to have to wait, while it downloads and pre-installs the maps needed for your flight plan, before you can take off. Do you? If it downloads the assets as you're flying, then you can take off almost immediately (provided you have enough bandwidth) and then fly anywhere you want.

I don't know anything about MSFS, but I would hope that a big enough cache could avoid it having to download hardly anything during your subsequent flights over the same areas.

 

[gggplaya]

Never played/used Microsoft Flight Simulator. Why isn't this installed on the PC instead of streaming it?

This simulator uses actual real world maps and topography data, as well as buildings and even live weather. You can literally fly into a hurricane happening in real time in real life.

 

[Geef]

I can already imagine a family looking at next month's cable bill seeing a charge for like 500 dollars extra. The new charges are because the kid just bought that new version of Flight Simulator and went way over the cap by playing it for 2 weeks straight.

 

[abufrejoval]

You've never heard of a CDN?

​

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_delivery_network​

​

That's another area of gripes with M$FS for me:

I bought it on Steam. Naturally. Every other game store just sucks!

And the Microsoft store is banned on my systems, for obvious reasons or because it doesn't work (e.g. Windows 2022 server).

Steam has the very best content deliver network you can imagine.

Not only does it typically saturate my Gbit internet link, if it doesn't it's usually the local storage or rather Windows which actually limits game installs, e.g. if the compressed inputs get expanded into thousands of little files, which Microsoft likes to inspect intensively, serially and slowly. Doesn't matter if you have NVMe with "direct storage" underneath, while game data is written to disk.

You notice, because on secondary systems it won't even download from the internet but from my primary steam cache. And those links are 10Gbit/s, cache storage is a SATA SSD RAID0 capable of sustaining 1GByte/s (matching the 10Gbit network).

It's a very different story on Linux, but that's another tale.

But M$FS insists on doing its own downloading and expansion of files from their own servers and will only do it while FS is actually running!

Which means it blocks your system while doing the update. It even blocks the Steam library (might have changed with the latest Steam releases), so you can't even play another game while the update is going on.

And of course you can't just say let me play now and do the update later... my gaming slots are rare and short which often means that "I miss the plane".

M$: the PC is us! Whatever we do is right because we do it!

Break them up!

 

[USAFRet]

And the Microsoft store is banned on my systems, for obvious reasons or because it doesn't work (e.g. Windows 2022 server).

Thats one of the oddities you accept if you try to game on a server OS.

 

[abufrejoval]

Thats one of the oddities you accept if you try to game on a server OS.

It's not a different OS.

It's really just Windows configured differently.

And I'm not missing it, just adding another reason for not using it.

What I do dislike a lot is how hard M$ is trying to push it onto the unwilling nevertheless.

And I'm just using a CUDA workstation for gaming during after hours.

I paid, I own, so I get to choose how I use it.

Not some ursurper who got hired to keep the place clean.

 

[USAFRet]

It's not a different OS.

It's really just Windows configured differently.

And I'm not missing it, just adding another reason for not using it.

What I do dislike a lot is how hard M$ is trying to push it onto the unwilling nevertheless.

And I'm just using a CUDA workstation for gaming during after hours.

I paid, I own, so I get to choose how I use it.

Not some ursurper who got hired to keep the place clean.

I completely understand it is the same OS under the hood. Mostly.

But being a server OS, some things have been removed or completely disabled.

And yes, I have run various WinServer editions at home.
Knowing and accepting the differences.


And as far as "I own"...please study up on the differences between owning and licensing.

 

[umeng2002_2]

Only real way to avoid data caps is to live in an area with two broadband providers. I have access to cable and fiber. No caps with either of them because you can always just switch, and they know it.

Blame your county governments for allowing only single providers in your area.

 

[bit_user]

Only real way to avoid data caps is to live in an area with two broadband providers. I have access to cable and fiber. No caps with either of them because you can always just switch, and they know it.

I'm not so sure about that. The heavy data users are more expensive for them, so they actually might not mind dumping you on their competitor.

I'll bet there's an amount of data that would cause them to at least throttle you.