Ya...well MS can spew all the marketing stuff all they want but for me at this point, I will just continue with P3D with out consideration of a new MS sim. I will continue to hope it all works out but After 20+ years of their marketing junk and just dumping stuff on the community not to mention when they nearly destroyed the hobby shutting down the ACE program, then I am firmly in the "show me the proof" group. The first time they start with the old "well this slide show will work good some day when we get better more powerful computers" then I will be in the "Nope not again....not going to do that again" group.

I've been trying to figure out why a user would need a beefy computer to run a film sent down from the cloud and I think the answer is that all airplanes will be on the user's computer and your PC will be responsible for modelling and rendering the aircraft complete with ray tracing if your video card can do that.  the outside view is what is created in the cloud and then viewed from your perspective.

The real beauty of the film concept is that aircraft velocity is irrelevant.  You will see in terms of frames per second so it doesnt matter if you're moving at 50kts or 300kts --  there are only "frames per second" points that need to be shown.  The actual real life distance covered wont matter because that is between visible frames.

12 hours ago, rjfry said:

Can you watch a HD film on a smart TV streamed from Amazon AWS cloud platform through Wfi I can.

On my iPhone Wfi speed test download 27Mbps upload 5.6Mbps upstairs, router downstairs 

You only need around 6Mbps to stream an HD film. To stream a game at HD resolution needs much more bandwidth. A film is predictable - it's just a steady stream of data. A game is much more dynamic, particularly something fully streamed where none of the game is actually on your system. Hence the Stadia requirement for a minimum of 20Mbps just to play at 1080p.

Edited September 4, 20196 yr by vortex681

Like the new XBOX no downloading just streaming.

On 9/4/2019 at 10:00 PM, rjfry said:

Like the new XBOX no downloading just streaming.

Not true: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/16/20808358/microsoft-xbox-project-scarlett-no-streaming-only-console-phil-spencer-interview

7 hours ago, vortex681 said:

Not true: https://www.theverge.com/2019/8/16/20808358/microsoft-xbox-project-scarlett-no-streaming-only-console-phil-spencer-interview

Be interesting how that will work on MSFS as it`s SSD storage will not be that big and it uses some as VRAM.

15 hours ago, rjfry said:

Be interesting how that will work on MSFS as it`s SSD storage will not be that big and it uses some as VRAM.

As far as I'm aware, apart from stating it will have an SSD, I've not seen anything about what size it will be. Plus, existing consoles seem to cope well enough with having many games installed (including 4k) without the need to fully stream them.

10 hours ago, vortex681 said:

As far as I'm aware, apart from stating it will have an SSD, I've not seen anything about what size it will be. Plus, existing consoles seem to cope well enough with having many games installed (including 4k) without the need to fully stream them.

I was not aware that the present console run flight simulators.

On 9/3/2019 at 12:34 PM, domkle said:

In any case, the team would be welcome to say that they are working on the issue. 

 

You don't even know if there is an issue lol

On 9/4/2019 at 4:35 PM, vortex681 said:

You only need around 6Mbps to stream an HD film. To stream a game at HD resolution needs much more bandwidth. A film is predictable - it's just a steady stream of data. A game is much more dynamic, particularly something fully streamed where none of the game is actually on your system. Hence the Stadia requirement for a minimum of 20Mbps just to play at 1080p.

The HUGE difference is Stadia is streaming the ENTIRE game and as far as we know, FS 2020 will just be streaming static scenery. So 6mb/s just might be fine and dandy.

There will be a small window in the middle of your Screen:

Time to download scenery: 17 hours and 27 minutes

 

4 minutes ago, Ricardo41 said:

There will be a small window in the middle of your Screen:

Time to download scenery: 17 hours and 27 minutes

 

17-odd hours I can cope with that but for how long a flight  😁 ?

On 9/8/2019 at 9:06 AM, Krakin said:

The HUGE difference is Stadia is streaming the ENTIRE game and as far as we know, FS 2020 will just be streaming static scenery. So 6mb/s just might be fine and dandy.

It is an interesting comparison though - while the final metric is really packets over time, the needs are somewhat different.

I'm sure you know this, but for the people who are not aware  - Stadia, like similar streaming services, is running the game on a remote instance generated ad-hoc on a cloud service. The processing on the CPU and GPU, as well as the accesses and writes to the memory and virtual storage are all done on that remote instance, and the output of the GPU is being captured by a program that does a quick compression and ships it over the internet to the app on your local device. For Stadia, they claim 1080p (4k for premium subscribers) at up to 60fps (this is of course dependent on bandwidth).

So you've got a 1080p or 4k screen capture with compression being sent up to 60 times a second, but as a video stream, so probably just deltas between pixels each frame, and the return stream is whatever input you're sending back from keyboard, mouse, controllers, etc.

What's that? You want to hear the game too? Oh, well I guess we need to stream sound and also a time code to sync up with the video. So that's a lot.

 

With the new Flight Simulator, depending on your ortho texture resolution settings and bandwidth, you'll be getting compressed textures at varying resolutions/LODs. I think it would be reasonable for the engine to prioritize the close textures right in front of you and within your current view, and then branching out to cover the circle around you. Then you start getting the lower res versions of the slightly further out terrain directly ahead of you, and so on to the limits of your visual range setting (adjusting for atmospheric conditions).  A lot of this loading can probably happen while the sim is loading itself, and can be assisted by a local cache, which will certainly not be able to store all the textures locally, but frequently requested or recent orthos can live there too.

Look at it situationally, you spawn in at an airport. While the "Terrain Loading" part of the loading screen comes up, it's grabbing the high res ortho and buildings from the cloud for that airport. Maybe this starts as a "look ahead" when you first select the airport from the menu. Now you're staring at your cockpit dash and the tarmac in front of you, maybe some trees in the distance, but guess what? The sim is using that time to pull in high res textures of things around you. It's not the same sort of consistent bandwidth demand as a 60Hz 4K video stream with sound. As you start to get up into the sky, an intelligent program will already be grabbing tiles for where you could be going. It might even be set up to use idle time to look ahead along any flight plan you've might have entered. But basically any time that you're looking at terrain that's already loaded, the sim can be grabbing content that you haven't gotten to yet.

Sure, you can do calculations that look at a jet zipping along in a straight line and the distance it will cover over time, and there will probably be some scenarios where your pace and bandwidth outrun your ability to pull in the absolute highest res scenery. But I think in most use cases, there will be plenty of time of us looking at the same view/area to allow other terrain to download.

On 9/4/2019 at 2:51 AM, domkle said:

What I fear is not progress but a repetitive pattern, a sim yet again in advance for its time. Been there, done that. 😏

As long as settings can be shifted down, the positive is that in a couple years the sim would look even better with new hardware. 

Interesting post on Guru3D gears of war, that project scarlet will have some support for RT.