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

Obviously the flight simulator runs in the cloud.

At this point you might as well stream the game video, it would be less bandwidth.

That seems excessive

Okay so after reading the article, that 150MB/s statement is doing a LOT of heavy lifting.

So first off, that was the fastest they recorded. So they just took that times an hour and said "Whoa if it stayed that sustained for the whole hour it'd be 81GB!!". Bam, clickbait title achieved. Ad revenue pleeeease

Now, for actual data, it looks like in rural areas it's about 10mbps and in cities about 100. I'll just throw it out there, why wpukdnt you want it to stream back as fast as possible?

This is like the same stupid RAM argument. I WANT you to use as much as you can! What is the point of paying for the pipe if you don't use everything you can?! There is no reason they shouldn't push it through faster. It's not more data, it's not a constant stream of 150MB/s like the garbage title claims, it peaks at 150MB/s. So good. I'm paying for gigabit, use the full pipe. When I'm playing a game that is my number one priority, give it to me as fast as you can.

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.

What!? Why the games don't just run locally

Cant wait for how many flight nerds are about to find out about their comcast data caps.

A lot of isps are rolling out gigabit and even faster internet. Finally having a killer app for it will increase demand for it and shame slower isps to upgrade their old coaxial and copper cables with fiber.

So that's about 15 hours before exceeding your Comcast data cap for the month (1.2TB) assuming you don't use your internet for anything else that month. Then after that it starts costing you about $16/hr to play in data usage alone. ($10 per 50GB)

Are they streaming it to you??

Wait that would actually take FAR LESS DATA

The next flight aim is gonna lean even heavier into streaming. So not just landscape but also plane models will be streamed. So this is gonna get worse not better

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

GeForce now uses 20 gigs/hour at the highest quality, how are they not just sending the entire video to your screen, what more do they need to send??