Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 needs 64GB of RAM for ideal performance — oddly, the game install size is only 30GB

Probably just uncompressing a lot of stuff and pulling data from the internet and having to keep it without any cleaning

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That's exactly what they're doing: the assets are going to be streamed and then probably cached in RAM, thus you need a lot of RAM.

Of course this makes me think that FS2024 is going to get live-serviced and killed at some point when they decide to stop hosting all that data and welp so much for your game you bought, too bad.

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- My understanding is that much of the map data is also used by bing maps and other satelite services. So those are unlikely to go away in the short term.
  
  But also? The same is true for 2020. Yes, it will probably stop working at some point down the line. But it is a really good game for the time being and people have already gotten 4 years of awesome support for probably the best general purpose flight sim out there.
  
  Also.. this is the kind of game that kind of requires a "live service" element. Because having people download static map data for the entire planet just to play a game is untenable. Let alone providing semi-regular updates and supporting the questionably tasteful minigame of racing to go fly through the latest natural disaster.
  
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- The existing MSFS is already effectively a live service. Lots of features which make it stand out are not available in offline mode.
  
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- I doubt it's pulling in massive amounts of data.
  
  But the maps data it does pull in will be messed about with, a bunch of trees splatted all over it, buildings extrapolated, water flows, etc. That'll be what's taking the RAM.
  
  The actual flying seems like the least interesting part of this game, and what they've really made is Google Earth on steroids.
  
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There are some 3d demoscene programs that use miniscule amounts of disk space but still need a fair bit of memory for working space.

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- Like .kkrieger https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.kkrieger
  
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FS2020 downloads 600GB of something ROUTINELY

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Oddly? This is not odd at all.

It's been a while sincce I wrote code, but I'll try to remember. Basically disk size and ram size have no connection. Disk size is for already generated assets (maybe you need to remember how the planes look like, so you create assets for all the planes. Or you want to have textures for the scenery, or for the Lincoln monument, or whatever).

But then you need to load those resources into RAM to access them faster, because if you try to load them directly from disk, it's a lot slower. So some part of those 64GB of RAM is because you are loading some premade assets.

But aside from this, there's also dynamically generated data that you have no way of knowing about at the beginning of the program, so you can't prepare in advance and generate assets for it. Like say for example the player wants to begin flying the plane - he's gonna have some different inputs than any other player. Maybe he drives slower at the beginning, or goes a little to the right when he takes off. Or his destination will be completely different. You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane's weight and who knows what else, I'm not a pilot. All of this, you allocate memory dynamically, based on user changes, and this uses the RAM as well.

Not to mention - you can make a 1kb program that takes 64 GB of RAM. You just ask the operating system for that much memory. You don't even need to fully use it. It'll take you one line of code.

All this to say - nothing odd about the program being smaller than the RAM requirements. It can mean it's not optimized, but it can also mean it has a lot of dynamic calculations that it's doing and a lot of stuff it needs to remember (and in the case of a flight Sim this wouldn't surprise me).

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Technically correct, but if I'd have any input into hiring a person whose background involves making a flight simulator requiring 64GB RAM, that doesn't emulate every mol in that plane for that cost (I'm exaggerating a bit), I'd ask many questions.

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- It requires 16GB RAM, which is perfectly acceptable. But it can use more if available, for high res textures I assume. Which are streamed from Microsoft's servers, explaining in part the difference between install size and max memory requirements.
  
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- So.... Sid Meier?
  
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You now need to remember his velocity, his position on the map, the direction of his flight, his altitude, his plane's weight and who knows what else, I'm not a pilot.

You're not wrong per se, but I'm having trouble fathoming gigabytes of data being consumed by these types of parameters. You could probably track hundreds of thousands of airplanes with that much space. The only thing that I could imagine taking up that much memory is extremely detailed airflow simulation.

However, as a rule of thumb, the vast majority of memory data for video games is in most cases textures and geometry, and not so much the simulation. Based on the article, it seems this game streams high resolution geometry data based on your current location on earth, which I would say is the most probable reason it asks for so much memory.

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Great as soon as I upgrade to 32GB then games start wanting 64.

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Your 32gb can do a lot and will still let you do a lot for a reasonable timeframe. No need to worry.

this situation reminds me of this interesting study: https://www.eoblab.com/_files/ugd/06b6e1_2e2b75f5053f40729dea921c758b8fec.pdf

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That's not really odd. It likely caches decompressed assets and such.

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They've also talked about massively leveraging cloud computing and streaming, it's likely a lot of actual scenery isn't part of the offline file size unless you cache the areas for offline play (if that's even an option)

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- Yeah. That was admittedly the big issue with Australia. With VFR it was useless unless we used Orbx in the days
  
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I wonder if it’s going to take several hours to download all the world content before allowing you into the menu screen like MSFS2020 does.

I wonder if they’ll insist on using MS servers for the content and will be kept at MS server caps at 5MBPS, meaning that it will take 20+ hours of downloading before you can even play, pulling you outside of the 2 hour Steam return window.

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Afaik Steam does refund games if you tell support that you spent time troubleshooting or waited for the launcher to download the actual files.
Though I only think to have read about it. No concrete proof.

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- Hell, they’ve been refunding Linux users for GTAV this week because of the change to BattleEye.
  
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- Yeah the Steam refund 2 hour thing is just the no questions asked guaranteed refund window. You can absolutely request a refund outside of that window and they'll be quite reasonable in most cases.
  
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- Years ago, I tried cities skylines on a sort of shitty PC… spent at least 8 hours trying to get it to work, then just gave up.
  
  Requested a refund and it was granted almost immediately.
  
  I bought a better PC and repurchased, and not it runs fine but the game itself is pretty mod dependent and I have spent more time installing and uninstalling mods than actually playing the game.
  
  So yes, ask for a refund and you will probably get it even outside the 2hour window.
  
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Yeah fucking MSFS2020 was such a bust for me living in Australia. It took days to download then I finally got it working something went wrong with install files and had to dick around. In the end I played 3 hours of it but have hundreds in download time.

Fuck MSFS

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- I was seriously hyped for it and waited years until I had a good gaming rig and then when I downloaded it I couldn’t even get past the loading screen. Unable to establish connection to Microsoft servers. I ended up buying Xplane 12 and Aerofly FS4 instead.
  
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malloc knows no limits.

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Except SIZE_MAX I suppose 🙄

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And .kkrieger is 96 kilobytes and uses around 200MB of RAM iirc.

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JavaScript developers hate this one weird trick!

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The demo scene was always technically amazing

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Permanently Deleted

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Interesting—D2R only had 1-3 seconds’ load time for me! Was it bad on consoles without SSDs?

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- Nowadays 2 seconds is an eternity considering M.2 drive speed and DDR4 bandwidth. Baldur's Gate 1 for example, nothing is compressed and load times are in single digit milliseconds. Sure BG1 is loading like 1/8th the stuff but load times are 1/300th
  
  There's actually a program people use for D2R to unpack textures and it cuts load time significantly, but the install and the uncompressed files have a massive footprint
  
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This game feels like the perfect candidate for streaming from XCloud/GeForce Now since all those data doesn’t really need to be transferred all the time. And the game’s design can tolerate a bit input latency.

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Probably will be available on Gamepass Ultimate or whatever the streaming one is called.

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30GB plus unlimited data streaming while using it…

That said, I suppose one plus is that this hopefully wont need as many 10+GiB updates literally right when I finally have an hour free and want to play it.

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30GB to install then 100+ after you open the game and it downloads updates and scenery. Same deal as 2020.

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I'm thinking 30 before opening the game and then 100+ after.

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Oddly? The game needs ram to store data like variables that the game generates, like physics simulations, among other game systems. The game's asset size alone doesn't really matter.

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I know. That statement was weird. In just a few lines of code I can chew up all available ram on a machine.

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- Which is you messing around, nothing professional. RAM leaks are a big bug.
  
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Nah, most of the space is filled with textures in a graphical game. Which is odd in 2:1 RAM:disk ratio, since most of the textures are in ddx nowadays, a format the GPU can use 1:1. You can't really compress ddx.

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- They're taking ram, though not vram.
  
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I don’t want to pretend-pilot a hot air balloon that much

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It probably streams the content during play.

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It definitely does, it pulls satellite data of the whole world

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Just to provide some context as someone who played the hell out of 2020 (on gamepass) and is looking forward to buying 2024 minute 1 and then figuring out how to keep a cat from fucking up a HOTAS sled for minutes 2-900:

The install is small because that is just the core game. Theoretically, that is all you need and it contains the meshes/logic for meshes and plane textures and so forth. You will then stream map data as you play and cache that. So the first time you take off at Pyongyang International it will take a bit of time to load but subsequent trips will be super fast.

That said... you will almost assuredly download the world packs. This is the much more hand crafted cities and airports so you can genuinely feel like you are flying over Paris or escaping from London Heathrow's international terminal and so forth. Or just to fix some weirdness because of a building layout near a river. And those world packs get big.

Before I switched over to linux for full time gaming? My PC install of MSFS 2020 was probably 100-200 GB on its own just from all the updates?

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Casual FS2020 enjoyer here, what changes have you the most excited for 2024?

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Great. Now I'll have to buy this to justify overspending on 96gb of ddr5.

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I'm glad they're moving the world update and other massive downloads to something in the cloud and on-demand. Anything between 10-40% of my "play time" on steam was actually downloading stuff.

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lol i remember when you'd get called an idiot for installing 16 gb ram

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I remember being asked what I needed 64 MB of RAM for. My answer, of course, being "because I can."

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- My server has around 156GB RAM.
  
  Do I use most of it? Nah.
  
  Why then?
  
  Cuz it was free from work and I wanted to hit the amount from Weird Al’s “it’s all about the Pentiums”
  
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- after years of dealing with emm386 trying to get ultima 7 to run on DOS, i always bought all the ram i could afford. fuck all that "you don't need that much" bullshit
  
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Can’t have too much, but you can have not enough.

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Rememeber how "no one will ever need more than 8gb of ram"? Up until fairly recently (a few years ago) you could not talk about anything having to do with ram online without someone coming along and being like "ACKTCHUALLY no one needs more than 8gb of ram for anything even gaming".

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Well, I even remember discussions if 640k is really necessary or if 512 is ok.

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Memory leaks goes brrrr

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Quick! Name one thing that has nothing to do with the other and make that your headline!

_

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I read the download size is like 150GB. That’s why I didn’t buy it on sale.

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that's MSFS 2020

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- Ah okay. I saw it on Steam listed as just MS Flight Simulator. Assumed it was the latest one.
  
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The hardware and bandwidth demands of the first game were why I stopped playing it. I had a machine that could run it (and an even better one now) and internet that could handle it, but it still just wasn't a smooth experience. I don't have a cap on my internet data but my speed isn't particularly high, which meant the 80-150gb per week of data the game consumed was certainly felt.

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Pcs are clearly inferior, that's like 32gb on a Mac. /s

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Comparing a person computer to another personal computer

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Microsoft is to memory as Cortés is to Mexico.

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flightgear better

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Is it fun to play?

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Defines: fun.

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The game is like 200gb, it just downloads it incrementally

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Is there any reason to choose MSFS over Flightgear other than simply being unaware of the latter's existence?

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I don't know that other one, but what hooked people on MSFS was the AI terrain made from satellite images letting you fly from anywhere to anywhere, and some capitals are handmade.

They also added missions based on the previous games to celebrate the series history.

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- Oh, it's a game now? Back when I dabbled with it (early 2000s) it was a simulator as the name says. Flightgear is an open source simulator that, according to pilots, feels more realistic.
  
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I mean, yes, as I’m sure you know already. Flightgear is a fine product and lots of respect to the contributors, but the support around MSFS, the level of detail and whole host of other factors make MSFS the one to beat; even if the flight model of XPlane is probably a tad better.

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