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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I don’t get it; what do you think they’re doing?
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!
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
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.
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.
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.