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

[SyCoREAPER]

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.

But you will be downloading, constantly, as assets are streamed, cached, processed, purged, repeat. This game will literally kill peoples SSD's and NVMe's with all the write cycles and hit that TBW fast. Anyone considering this game should buy a dedicated small 150GB SSD or NVMe. Modest 50GB for the game and 100GB cache for assets and game updates.

As for the waiting to download part you mentioned, that's not my gripe. My gripe is that when they get tired of hosting it, they'll Ubisoft this like it's 'The Crew' and it will be unplayable.

I know they need to charge full price for the base game to offset development and said hosting but I have a feeling a paid tier for premium/priority/HighRes servers is going to show it's face down the line.

To think it will stay alive forever is unreasonable but what they should do when EOL comes around is make the servers open/free software so people can use their API to the maps data and still be playable.

As it stands, who knows if their servers will even be able to take the load initially. I'm going to wait this out. Actually I take that back, I'm not going to even be playing this, I just wanted to make some points for people to keep in mind.

I still have a 700 (total) page Operation Manual for the Saturn V Rocket and the LM Module to live my Apollo-era fantasy in 'Reentry'. The most complex and time consuming simulator you'll ever "play".

 

[abufrejoval]

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.

I know the difference, what it is and what it isn't: all limitations are artificially imposed by Microsoft code and configuration data.

I got MSDN, so licensing isn't a problem but a privilege dearly paid.

I made that one server with 2008, because it expected to use RDP a lot, having started with Citrix in NT 3.51.

Can't easily cross-update to a desktop, so it stuck, even with the hardware being completely replaced several times.

So far the fact that it doesn't phone home by default and doesn't come with a shop was a bonus and a reason to keep it.

But 2022 doesn't have an equivalent successor, 2025 seems to be core-only.
So it's another Windows 10 to 11 migration nightmare: just what I need...

 

[abufrejoval]

Lol those certain places are not in the game

Most of the time you just get very badly pixelated data.

A few weeks ago I was planning a trip to Brussels and trying to figure out the best way to commute between the hotel and the meeting venue. There is a lot of big construction going on there and I just like to view the place before I go to that exact location the first time to get some visual references.

It's the more pedestrian or public transport places where I really have come to appreciate Google Street View, e.g. also in San Francisco or New York. In a place like Dallas or anything else more car oriented, Maps and navigation are just fine. But in places with high-rise buildings, several layers of walkways or distinct levels for different cars, pedestrian and perhaps even public transport like La Défense in Paris it's a life savior... or at least it helps you prepare.

Coming back to Brussels, the royal palace is quite central and evidently too much of a potential target to expose on Google Maps... so right on the path I needed to take I got faced with a BLOB!

Not sure how effective it is these days with private satellite imagery available with centimeter level detail and very frequent updates commercially.

They discover Chinese submarine bases those guys probably spent millions to try and hide and even observe having their first nuke sub sink, but of course those aren't exactly small. There the frequency of updates made all the difference, but they have the details, too.

 

[RyzenNoob]

I guess you need to win the lottery or two to even run the game.

The rig needed to run the game, probably is a high end machine. Which costs in excess of $/£3000. Now, you need an expensive internet connection to have anyone else using the internet while you play the game, to have any chance of using the internet for themselves.
Quite ridiculous. Unless you're into designing airplanes

 

[razor512]

Has anyone tested how the game looks when playing offline with no cache? Often when a game becomes heavily reliant on one function, the fallback functions will be heavily compromised.

For example, how will it render NYC when there is no cloud access, will it render no buildings, or will they have at least some local AI generated textures?
These types of things are important to know since given the extreme cloud reliance, those servers will shut down very quickly after the sales of the game tapers off, and people who purchased it. will be stuck with the base map data with no cloud enhancements.

 

[CelicaGT]

Absolute malarkey, PEAK was around 150Mbps watching other more mainstream streamers, averages were around 10-30Mbps. This video shows similar. This was also in NY City, Ultra 4K. These data rates are almost identical to what I see in 2020, no story here.