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.
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.
