this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
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Are they streaming it to you??
Wait that would actually take FAR LESS DATA
They don't stream a video feed to you, they stream the terrain to you
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.
because 1) the figure in the headline is only the most extreme value they found. 2) the image generated by your GPU is only one perspective of the entire 3D environment. maybe in order to download the area you're also downloading objects that don't need to be displayed on your screen yet. And 3) cloud streaming videos are also heavily compressed.
The current Microsoft Flight Sim is gigantic. My install folder is upwards of 300 GB and I'm missing a few terrain updates
It is detailed terrain for an entire planet, and figures are at around 10Mbps for just terrain without buildings.
Assuming you're flying at 800kmh in something like an airbus A380, you're flying 13.3km each minute, uncovering a large part of a new circle/sphere of terrain with a radius of 13km (half of it overlaps with old already-downloaded terrain). That's half of 555km squared of terrain. That's a lot of terrain. If you want that terrain to be fairly accurate, you'll want to see at least meter accuracy near the plane (if you're near the ground you'll want to see one datapoint of terrain per meter or more), with lower levels of detail as you get further away. Add onto that things like the placement of trees, bushes, rocks, and all the texture data of the terrain (probably an index into existing possibly procedural textures), and you've got a lot of data that needs to be transferred.
10Mbps seems pretty fair for all of that.
Also terrain data is updated regularly, and you might not want to keep around old terrain in the first place. There are reasons like players only flying some routes once and never again, and if you save all of mozambique for someone who actually only flies around in the US that's bad too.
EDIT: Buildings of course cost extra. Airports take up a bit of bandwidth each time you take off or land, as they are probably custom modeled. Cities like NY or LA though will have a ton of custom modeled buildings and textures, and those cost a lot of bandwidth.
Because it is more data I guess ? Also probably has to use lossless compression, if it can be compressed at all. Whereas video compression algorithms are usually pretty damn lossy
I don't get it; what do you think they're doing?
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?
Why is that surprising? A compressed video stream is obviously smaller than actual textures and mesh data of the entire planet. You can’t compare the two.
Also NVidia doesn’t produce the stream out of thin air. They are running the game on their own servers then compress the final image and send it to you over the net. While MS sends you the actual game data like meshes and textures and you compute the screen image on your own machine. It’s not the same. What Nvidia is doing is expensive since for every client that connects they need a graphics card, a cpu and a SSD running in a server farm. If MS would do it that way you have to pay a subscription fee to play Flight Simulator. What MS does is just sending files. Since bandwidth is obviously exponentially cheaper than spinning up an instance of the game on a server for every customer they’ve decided to do it this way. So you only have to pay once.
continuing in https://lemmy.world/comment/12892907
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.
First of all, the textures probably are already compressed, so compressing them more doesn't do all that much. Secondly, streaming is just downloading, so you can just compress the stream. Sure you might lose a little bit of compression possibility when you don't present it as one big archive. But that probably saves way less than the tricks I mentioned before.
No they did not, you have to download it either way.... And streaming the render output is not at all the same as rendering locally on your own PC. Neither as an user experience nor as a cost benefit for Microsoft.
What makes you think it isn't an option? Most people probably aren't using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren't going to come near 95% of it.
Like game streaming, vs streaming cloud data, because the data is already based in azure.
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.
Well then you shouldn't have gotten rid of the big bacon classic! That would be like McDonalds getting rid of the BIG MAC, and replacing it with the double quarter pounder with cheese......except no condiments or toppings besides 8oz of BIG MAC sauce, and calling it the "MAC ATTACK".
AND WTF HAPPENED TO YOUR SPICY CHICKEN??? ITS LIKE HALF THE SIZE NOW! LIKE AN OVER GROWN CHICKEN NUGGET!
I haven’t had Wendy’s in at least a decade. You are telling me that they destroyed the spicy chicken sandwich. Maybe the best fast food sandwich of all time? This is a shock to me that I might not recover from.
Its so small now. It's so unfufilling.
Well, I can't conceive anything other than streaming 4K satellite terrain data that could take up that much data and be nefarious. This is download activity, not upload, so I don't see it being like a botnet or something.
How much upload activity is there?
30
But how much data does it take to send terrain information? Why not just send the picture of the terrain every moment (stream it) rather than whatever they're doing?
That would require Microsoft to do something like running a 1:1 local render of everything the player is doing in their sim, for everyone playing the game, at all times. And then they'd have to stream that video feed to the player and somehow make sure the elsewhere-rendered terrain is synced up perfectly with the player's local game. Doesn't really seem reasonable.
But the bandwidth has to be more expensive in the long run...
Probably not more expensive than the immense computing power they would need to support something like the method I mentioned. I'm quite sure they've done a cost analysis on this lol.
Because it's 3D? Have you seen the advertizements?
Because it requires computing power from the GPU to translate the terrain into an image of the terrain. They’re using your local GPU for that since GPUs are expensive, and also it minimizes latency between control input and view update. If you turn the camera you want that new view immediately, not 200ms later.
Data vs compute
It's easy to send all the data in an x mile radius of the players position. Or to identify the players position, speed, camera angle, etc. render it all, compress it, and then send the computer, rendered, video fees.
But obviously they're taking the more bandwidth intense route, that must cost them more money...
I smell copypasta.
i don't think that's appropriate for such deeply-invigorated trauma
Dude. What?
I think he's 's onto it that people playing Microsoft Flight Simulator are actually flying real life drones and bombing civilians without knowing, just like in Ender's Game.
Time will tell
I need some of whatever he's smoking
You mean like in Toys
Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?
Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just... throw it out? Users certainly don't keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game's CPU/GPU usage isn't particularly out of the ordinary.
So not much you could do here. Ockham's razor here just says... planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they've gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can't spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.
They're streaming in the 3d world detail, but the rendering engine is installed locally.
Playing on xCloud will just stream in the visuals that are rendered remotely, so a lot less bandwidth, but then you have the lag, and need a subscription.