13 minutes ago, Greazer said:

The streaming games are more suited to online 3d chess.

That's not true for streaming services like Stadia. See: https://store.google.com/product/stadia_games

10 hours ago, David Mills said:

If you're flying an actual aircraft, there is also a slight lag between controller input and response. If anything, this would add realism to the sim.

There is no lag in a real aircraft or current generation flight sims when turning a knob for radio frequency, or hitting a button on the autopilot panel and seeing the display change. You'd notice lag more with these operations than control input, if the entire sim was remotely processed and not just the scenery. 
 

29 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

That's not true for streaming services like Stadia. See: https://store.google.com/product/stadia_games

A Google exec recently said that the only reason they're able to do Stadia now, is that Google has built out an infrastructure of server locations all over the USA and Europe/UK, so the latency will be low enough for gaming. 

We don't know to what extent Microsoft has matched that, but I remember hearing something about increasing the number of Azure server locations. They must think it's possible if they're introducing XBox Cloud streaming next month.

We still don't know what types of games will be 100% streamed, and what the latency is like in countries far enough from the servers. I think it's unlikely that either Google or Microsoft has built enough server infrastructure for low-latency gaming in places like SE Asia, Africa, or South America.

19 minutes ago, Paraffin said:

We still don't know what types of games will be 100% streamed

See the link in my post above for what Google Stadia is planning to offer. Plenty of fast-paced action games and first-person shooters.

Edited September 24, 20196 yr by vortex681

can you play any of those titles on Google Stadia  in VR?

21 hours ago, n4gix said:

What a bright ray of sunshine you are! With an average of 10ms ping, there will not be any noticeable lag, imho.

And if they get it quick enough for professional twitch shooter players, it’s definitely quick enough for flight simmers. 

Just the idea of FS streaming is so wrong. What so everybody will only need dumb terminals?  Nvidia GPU redundant?  That's a cheap experience. I don't think so. The point of flight Sim is to build a mega rig and Jack up the settings (as much as possible). That shouldn't end.

1 minute ago, Greazer said:

The point of flight Sim is to build a mega rig and Jack up the settings (as much as possible). That shouldn't end.

You'd think the point of flight simming would be to simulate flying a plane... whether you need good hardware or not. The need to build monster systems stems from inefficiently running sims, aka FSX. To each their own, but I can't think of many people who enjoy throwing out money for new hardware every 3 years just to be able to run FSX/P3D at 30 FPS with medium settings.

33 minutes ago, Superdelphinus said:

And if they get it quick enough for professional twitch shooter players, it’s definitely quick enough for flight simmers. 

Yes, although we still don't know how much of these streaming services are aspirational, i.e. targeting future infrastructure on both the server and client side. Neither Stadia nor XBox cloud is online yet. We'll find out soon whether it actually works for competitive twitch-shooter games.
 

1 minute ago, threegreen said:

You'd think the point of flight simming would be to simulate flying a plane... whether you need good hardware or not. The need to build monster systems stems from inefficiently running sims, aka FSX. To each their own, but I can't think of many people who enjoy throwing out money for new hardware every 3 years just to be able to run FSX/P3D at 30 FPS with medium settings.

If the entire sim was streamed from the server, it's likely that the system would be locked-in for years with the back-end hardware specs. Just like a console generation, or the way MMOs feature software updates but rarely improve the actual server infrastructure. Meanwhile, PC-based flight sims can take advantage of incremental improvements in CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage as they come along.

For example, I think it's highly unlikely that you'd get something like hardware-based ray-tracing in a graphics stream from the server, considering what that would cost as a custom ray-traced stream for every user. But you can get it now with a PC graphics card, or the built-in ray tracing in the new XBox Scarlett. If you look at the specs for that upcoming Xbox, it's clear that MS is still placing bets on powerful end-user hardware and not going full bore into streamed games and thin clients.

2 hours ago, threegreen said:

 I can't think of many people who enjoy throwing out money for new hardware every 3 years just to be able to run FSX/P3D at 30 FPS with medium settings.

By all accounts, FS2020 is a breakaway from FSX engine, all new, modern, designed to take advantage of the latest graphics features. I expect that investing in a new powerful Computer/GPU will deliver a much higher ROI than in FSX days. You will see.

Edited September 24, 20196 yr by Greazer

3 hours ago, boeingcorp said:

can you play any of those titles on Google Stadia  in VR?

No. VR frame rate and latency requirements are way in excess of what can be achieved via full game streaming.

MSFS might be available on xCloud (MS's answer to Google Stadia) in the future. Personally I doubt it because flight sims are so reliant on low controller latency.

Streaming orthophoto terrain, autogen and photogrammetry buildings is something else entirely, but the two seem to keep being talked about interchangeably on here.

5 hours ago, Paraffin said:

We don't know to what extent Microsoft has matched that, but I remember hearing something about increasing the number of Azure server locations. They must think it's possible if they're introducing XBox Cloud streaming next month.

According to a presentation delivered at the Ignite 2017 conference, more than 3 million physical servers make up Azure, or let’s say, made up Azure at that time. It’s really hard to tell an exact number as Azure is constantly expanding in regional footprint and compute (storage / network) capacity as well. Probably it’s closer to 3,5 million now, or maybe more.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-has-Microsoft-Azure-worldwide

I saw an article about three weeks ago with a photo of one of their "server farms" with 100,000 1u racked servers in massive towers. According to that article MS is opening up another 42 locations before the year's end.

4 hours ago, n4gix said:

According to a presentation delivered at the Ignite 2017 conference, more than 3 million physical servers make up Azure, or let’s say, made up Azure at that time. It’s really hard to tell an exact number as Azure is constantly expanding in regional footprint and compute (storage / network) capacity as well. Probably it’s closer to 3,5 million now, or maybe more.

https://www.quora.com/How-many-servers-has-Microsoft-Azure-worldwide

I saw an article about three weeks ago with a photo of one of their "server farms" with 100,000 1u racked servers in massive towers. According to that article MS is opening up another 42 locations before the year's end.

They are racing to beat Amazon and Oracle. It's for Business use, they have all been sold they need to be in the "cloud" now. Just like lemmings they follow one by one.   This is not for Flight Sim 🤣

31 minutes ago, Greazer said:

They are racing to beat Amazon and Oracle. It's for Business use, they have all been sold they need to be in the "cloud" now. Just like lemmings they follow one by one.   This is not for Flight Sim 🤣

There are definitely business application but that doesn’t mean there’s no overlap with entertainment software. Project xCloud is going to be used for Xbox. 

11 hours ago, vortex681 said:

That's not true for streaming services like Stadia. See: https://store.google.com/product/stadia_games

Or GeForce Now.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/geforce/products/geforce-now/

It also supports ray tracing.

https://www.pcworld.com/article/3432957/nvidias-geforce-now-adds-real-time-ray-tracing-and-android-support-as-cloud-gaming-heats-up.html

Check out TomsHardware for the XCLOUD release next month.