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

Many countries don't have data caps on broadband.

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.

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.

This is why I prefer MB/s and Mbit/s it's less ambiguous.

What ISP? That seems awful.

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.

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.

Seeing how the game isn't out yet and we don't know what the settings are, I'm not going to agree with this non-article that it's always streaming that much data. FS2020 had different settings that you could put in, caching levels, caps, and more. I highly doubt it's constantly streaming that much.

As for RAM, disagree. In the case of games, it makes no sense to keep reading and writing from disk when there is ram available. Store it in RAM so it can be accessed quickly. The key is if the application releases RAM when the OS requests it to be released, or there is pressure. If I'm playing a game with 4k textures I 100% would rather have as many of them loaded into RAM when playing to make a smoother experience than constantly hitting my disk, which is on the thousands of times slower. I have 64GB just sitting there, I want them to use it.

your isp already knows youre streamin nonsense from microsoft. this wont trigger anything

ISPs won't even notice. They don't care about big upload/download unless it's continuous, affecting other users, or they get a legal notice.

Nobody remembers OnLive...

Just fly Boeing in game. It's a more authentic experience that way.

It's hardly Counterstrike.

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?

upload too? cause coax upload sucks ass

I live in a monopoly area. My only choice for internet is comcast at 10/5mbps down up and it costs me 180 a month. Two blocks away fiber costs 40 a month.

In the US, ISPs are government-enforced monopolies.

Why does the terrain take more (much more) bandwidth than a video stream?

And what the heck do you mean they're "streaming the terrain" surely it would be a one and done date transfer, much smaller than a live video packet stream, that amount of bandwidth is insane, you could do multiple 4k streams.

GeForce now streams the entire game to you, it takes a few mb/s, barely more than YouTube.

Microsoft could stream an entire game screen to you for far less bandwidth, so what are they actually sending to your machine?

My gut feeling? Probably something nafarious.

My proof? Decades of feeling like people were up to shady shit. Being told I have no proof, and to shut up, and then they later prove it was shady shit.

But hey, that 2003 Iraqi invasion TOTALLY saved the world from a nuclear blast, right? It couldn't have just been a series of government lies. The government wouldn't start a war, and kill young 18 year old men without a clear and proven threat, and have a solid plan in place to end that threat.

I'm 41 years old. I was two weeks away from turning 18 when 9/11 happened. By 2002 I smelled something fishy. I told my friends not to sign up to serve. I told them something was up. I was called a coward, and that George Bush was the president of the USA. He wouldn't lie to the nation about something so serious.

And now, 20+ years later, I'd just like to tell you how we still find the time to get together a few times a year, share some beers, and laugh about how wrong they were. How foolish they felt when Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, and how during the Obama years it was leaked that the Bush administration even knew it was bullshit at the time they said it.

I'd LIKE to tell you we do that...but they're all dead. Some killed in action, others came back with PTSD and killed themself. The end result is the same. I grew up from kindergarten through high school with boys that became men, and always were my brothers. Now I have half a dozen anniversary dates that I visit gravestones.

Ok, granted I got off track and forgot what the topic was. This game isn't that serious. But I still smell something up. It's probably running a crypto mine rig on your CPU in the background or some data harvesting farm, or something.

Again, no proof, but I smell bullshit.

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.

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

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

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

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