seems we all see something different when clicking the link 😆

 

 

Hello all,

Long time simmer and make believe pilot. I'm in the alpha/beta and like what I see. One topic I don't see mentioned is data usage. May be a good idea to see if you have a limit on your ISP 

1 hour ago, joec63 said:

One topic I don't see mentioned is data usage. May be a good idea to see if you have a limit on your ISP

I haven't seen any reports on the streaming usage.

My usage flying the Cessna 152 over land at ultra settings looks to be on the order of 1 GB per hour.  This is a rough estimate at this time and will vary according to the aircraft you fly with faster aircraft likely using more.  It is also likely to change as they're still fine tuning it on their end.

Edit to add:  I suspect a good rule of thumb will be that it will use about the same amount of streaming data as watching a 1080 movie.

Hook

Edited July 27, 20205 yr by LHookins

20 MBits is recommended. Thats 9 GByte per hour if continuously used. That makes 2 Terabytes in 220 hours.

In a KingAir, flying at a ground speed of 300 kts I can fly 66.000 miles in 220 hours. If I do that in a height of 1000 feet I can see 5 nm to the left and 5 to the right. That makes an area of 660.000 square miles covered by 2 Terabytes of data. California has 164.000 square miles.

The USA has 3,800.000 square miles. 12 Terabytes of data would be needed to have it covered in recommended quality.

Did I make a mistake?

 

Anyway, that doesn't mean anything, I just did the math because I was curious about the data volume streamed.

 

A thing I am interested in is if the sim would stream 1000 MBits if my connection allows it? Or 2000? That would be kind of cool then?

 

And there is something else I ask myself: The sims we have now also stream data, but they stream it from SSD. This allows for at least 2000 MBits. Now, the ideal spec for the new sim is a rate of 50 MBits. Hmmmmm.....

How can ortho data coming in at arate of 50 MBits be as nice as, lets say ORBX True Earth coming from SSD at a much higher rate?

Karl

37 minutes ago, kaha said:

20 MBits is recommended. Thats 9 GByte per hour if continuously used. That makes 2 Terabytes in 220 hours.

I doubt the simulator will continuously stream data at such a fast connection speed, assuming you are flying and not constantly slewing around. It will probably hit the maximum when initially loading an area and occasionally spike when it needs to load data fast, to prevent pop-in for example, at least until it reaches hard disk cache or RAM limits.

1 hour ago, kaha said:

20 MBits is recommended. Thats 9 GByte per hour if continuously used. That makes 2 Terabytes in 220 hours.

In a KingAir, flying at a ground speed of 300 kts I can fly 66.000 miles in 220 hours. If I do that in a height of 1000 feet I can see 5 nm to the left and 5 to the right. That makes an area of 660.000 square miles covered by 2 Terabytes of data. California has 164.000 square miles.

The USA has 3,800.000 square miles. 12 Terabytes of data would be needed to have it covered in recommended quality.

Did I make a mistake?

 

 

I think, there si a big mistake 🙂 You forget, that if you fly higher, you don't need full resolution textures, because you can't see so small details. And if you fly lower, you need higher textures resolution, but you can't see so big area at one time. Developers present, that you need 50Mbps for maximum scenery quality in each situation and probably it's calculated with some reserves.

The only math I did was compare how much data I'd used that day to how long I'd flown.  Last flight was 2.6 hours and 1.8 GB data used.  I'll start keeping records by flight from now on.

Hook

1 hour ago, LHookins said:

The only math I did was compare how much data I'd used that day to how long I'd flown.  Last flight was 2.6 hours and 1.8 GB data used.  I'll start keeping records by flight from now on.

Hook

That's really not bad and better than I was expecting. Fortunately, I'm lucky and my ISP doesn't have download limits. What I'm wondering though is whether all the downloaded data goes directly to your hard drive first and then into RAM and VRAM, or whether a significant fraction of it gets streamed directly into RAM. I'm thinking about how quickly SSDs may wear out flying this sim a lot if the former is the case?

On 7/25/2020 at 3:07 PM, ca_metal said:

I think the alpha NDA will never be lifted. After the 08/18 we will just talk about the released version. 

Enough for me. I think it will be similar.

Edited July 28, 20205 yr by aleex

16 hours ago, LHookins said:

I haven't seen any reports on the streaming usage.

My usage flying the Cessna 152 over land at ultra settings looks to be on the order of 1 GB per hour.

Isn’t there some usage indication in the settings? 1 GB/h is roughly 2 MBit/s, that’s way less than the (lowest) recommendation.
 

10 hours ago, kaha said:

If I do that in a height of 1000 feet I can see 5 nm to the left and 5 to the right.

Did I make a mistake?

A thing I am interested in is if the sim would stream 1000 MBits if my connection allows it? Or 2000? That would be kind of cool then?

And there is something else I ask myself: The sims we have now also stream data, but they stream it from SSD. This allows for at least 2000 MBits. Now, the ideal spec for the new sim is a rate of 50 MBits. Hmmmmm.....

How can ortho data coming in at arate of 50 MBits be as nice as, lets say ORBX True Earth coming from SSD at a much higher rate?

I think you did. How do you get 5nm at 1000‘ height? I get way more than this. >30 NM to be more precise.

The sim would adapt to the speed you have available, at least that’s what I recall they said („adaptive streaming“). If you have 1 or 2 GBit/s that’s good for you but I wonder what for, as there is not that amount of data.

Why on earth (pun intended) would ortho data from True Earth stream at 2000 MBit/s from anywhere? That’s 250 MB/s or almost 1 TB/h of scenery. I pretty much doubt any currently available scenery is that complex (nowadays anyway haha).

Edited July 28, 20205 yr by badderjet

57 minutes ago, badderjet said:

Isn’t there some usage indication in the settings? 1 GB/h is roughly 2 MBit/s, that’s way less than the (lowest) recommendation.

My task manager usually indicates a bit under 2 MBps for MSFS.

But Gig per hour may not be a useful measurement.  It will be much higher when flying in complex areas.  Once I had a message than I'd exceeded my bandwidth (33 MBps), but only once and I suspect something else was using bandwidth at the same time.  A later flight in the same area didn't get a message

Hook

On 7/26/2020 at 5:01 PM, Wnuk said:

seems we all see something different when clicking the link 😆

 

 

Bing will start at your individual home-location. If you enter the coordinates, zoom in and switch to aerial view then you see what is ment.

On 7/26/2020 at 9:45 AM, MaVe64 said:

No, enter the coordinates, its a spot in Austria where on Bing maps the scenery jumps from snow to grass. Interesting spot to see what MSFS makes of it.

Oh sorry... as the coordinates are in the text I thought it will take you there directly...

My guess how it is solved:

It detects snow / clouds and combines the information of offline-mode landclasses with satellite images in those areas.

Edited July 29, 20205 yr by tweekz