Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight

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

That seems excessive

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.

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 don’t see why it matters though? You’re not gonna be playing the game on your phone with limited data

Buddy, today you’re going to learn about data caps.

I reckon it’s been a good ten years since I had a data cap on my home internet. These days I pay £30 a month for unlimited 900mbps fibre and it’s wonderful.

this isnt a thing on most countries on earth for “landline” internet.

monopolies in capitalism are brutal, and you guys shouldnt be allowing it.

I agree with you. They’ve even become a level of corporate governance with the whole copyright issue.

They still a thing? Not sure they’re that common in the UK at least 🤷🏻‍♂️

Thank your regulators then. There are very much still a thing. Not because they need to be. But because they allow ISPs to make more money by setting arbitrary limits.

My Starlink plan is 50gb per month!

Because my ISP charges $50/mo extra for the “privilege” of having unlimited data.

My biggest pet peeve is that they sell you a service, at a certain speed, that you can only use for like 50 hours a month…

That’s more than I pay for unlimited gigabit here wtf 😭

‘Land of the free’, init.

I love where I live, but my biggest miss on moving was leaving my fiber network behind and moving to Cox monopoly territory.

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.

Nah planes go wooosh over their heads

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

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.

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.

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.

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Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of internet bandwidth while in flight — equivalent to 81GB of data per hour(www.tomshardware.com)

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