If you have small data caps, it may even be cheaper.

Thank your regulators then. There are very much still a thing. Not because they need to be. But because they allow ISPs to make more money by setting arbitrary limits.

I love where I live, but my biggest miss on moving was leaving my fiber network behind and moving to Cox monopoly territory.

And with 12 terabytes on a 250 dollar hard drive, why do I care about 500 gigabytes?

If they’re using petabytes of data for flyover territory then they’ve already lost their goddamn minds.

In higher than high def? While you’re at 30k feet?

Ever look out a plane window?

What the fuck are they rendering?

Or use octals -> 1Mo/s = 1MB/s = 8Mb/s

No risk of confusion.

Bell Canada. One of 2 of the only options for ISPs in Canada.

Every ISP I’ve ever had in America.

Sounds like they need to throttle their payments

Insane isnt it, my cousin got a roaming charge driving across his own country.

I have a gigabit internet plan with Comcast , cost me $80 a month. And yes there is a 1.2tb data cap each month. Every 50gb that you go over, you are automatically charged an additional $10. Oh I’ll just choose another ISP…nope Comcast is the only option in my town. Not unless I want 5G cell Internet or satellite which is not super reliable or fast.

I will never understand why the United States insists on living about 30 years behind the rest of the planet.

Just because one shitty company has it doesn’t mean they all do. I have Quantum fiber which is 8/8 gbps at my house with no cap. Only costs me 165$ a month.

My cousin in a rural as shit location has fiber as well… 10/10 available for 240$. He currently does 1/1gbps and pays something like 65$

Depends on where you live, most places Comcast just has soft caps.

The US is actually moving further back. Data caps are a newer thing.

Capitalism, an oligarchy that controls major players, and legislation to keep public players out of the game in a lot of places. Even aside from the fact that private companies are able to prevent municipalities from making their own networks, Congress passed taxes to build out a fiber network and let the ISPs do fuck all, to the point that we had been taxed to the tune of $400 BILLION dollars A FUCKING DECADE AGO.

It constantly amazes me the shit our government lets corporations get away with.

You can pause large game downloads and pick them up again later.

Wasn’t even aware it was still a thing, apart from on mobile (where it somewhat makes sense-ish)

*Most

Sounds civilized and competitive.

Not the case for everyone. I’m regularly throttled watching a long 4k movie on Netflix or trying to download a big game from Steam.

What exactly does that mean? I thought you had anti-monopoly laws?

180!!! Wtf

Wait, so does a single company own all the cabling or something!? We have a despised-for-their-incompetence company called Openreach in Britain but the cables they manage cover almost the entire county and any ISP can use them.

Because it is more data I guess ? Also probably has to use lossless compression, if it can be compressed at all. Whereas video compression algorithms are usually pretty damn lossy

It is detailed terrain for an entire planet, and figures are at around 10Mbps for just terrain without buildings.

Assuming you’re flying at 800kmh in something like an airbus A380, you’re flying 13.3km each minute, uncovering a large part of a new circle/sphere of terrain with a radius of 13km (half of it overlaps with old already-downloaded terrain). That’s half of 555km squared of terrain. That’s a lot of terrain. If you want that terrain to be fairly accurate, you’ll want to see at least meter accuracy near the plane (if you’re near the ground you’ll want to see one datapoint of terrain per meter or more), with lower levels of detail as you get further away. Add onto that things like the placement of trees, bushes, rocks, and all the texture data of the terrain (probably an index into existing possibly procedural textures), and you’ve got a lot of data that needs to be transferred.

10Mbps seems pretty fair for all of that.

Also terrain data is updated regularly, and you might not want to keep around old terrain in the first place. There are reasons like players only flying some routes once and never again, and if you save all of mozambique for someone who actually only flies around in the US that’s bad too.

EDIT: Buildings of course cost extra. Airports take up a bit of bandwidth each time you take off or land, as they are probably custom modeled. Cities like NY or LA though will have a ton of custom modeled buildings and textures, and those cost a lot of bandwidth.

because 1) the figure in the headline is only the most extreme value they found. 2) the image generated by your GPU is only one perspective of the entire 3D environment. maybe in order to download the area you’re also downloading objects that don’t need to be displayed on your screen yet. And 3) cloud streaming videos are also heavily compressed.

The current Microsoft Flight Sim is gigantic. My install folder is upwards of 300 GB and I’m missing a few terrain updates

GeForce now does not stream the entire game to you. That’s the whole point of GeForce now, it just streams you the final render. Which is just 1 image, though at 60 per second. Which is way less than all the terrain data, textures, meshes, etc in multiple square kms of map data. Ever wonder why modern AAA games are 90+gb big? Thats all the assets that Microsoft streams to you in their flight sim. The actual code is only a few 10’s/100’s mb. Now imagine an AAA game that covers the whole earth and how much space those assets would take up. Hence why they have to stream it to you to make you even capable of playing this game.

Why is that surprising? A compressed video stream is obviously smaller than actual textures and mesh data of the entire planet. You can’t compare the two.

Also NVidia doesn’t produce the stream out of thin air. They are running the game on their own servers then compress the final image and send it to you over the net. While MS sends you the actual game data like meshes and textures and you compute the screen image on your own machine. It’s not the same. What Nvidia is doing is expensive since for every client that connects they need a graphics card, a cpu and a SSD running in a server farm. If MS would do it that way you have to pay a subscription fee to play Flight Simulator. What MS does is just sending files. Since bandwidth is obviously exponentially cheaper than spinning up an instance of the game on a server for every customer they’ve decided to do it this way. So you only have to pay once.

continuing in https://lemmy.world/comment/12892907

Well, I can’t conceive anything other than streaming 4K satellite terrain data that could take up that much data and be nefarious. This is download activity, not upload, so I don’t see it being like a botnet or something.

I smell copypasta.

Dude. What?

Eh, not much nefarious you can do by pushing data around. Taking a lot of CPU/GPU usage? Certainly, you can do a lot of evil with distributed computing. But bandwidth?

Costs a lot to host all that data to push to people, and to handle streaming it to so many as well, all for them to just… throw it out? Users certainly don’t keep enough storage to even store a constant 100Mb/s of sneaky evil data, let alone do any compute with it, because the game’s CPU/GPU usage isn’t particularly out of the ordinary.

So not much you could do here. Ockham’s razor here just says… planes are fast, MSFS is a high fidelity game, they’ve gotta load a lot of high accuracy data very quickly and probably can’t spare the CPU for terribly complicated decompression.