Yes, exactly! Coming from one of the best-made mindless game series to essentially gaming high art is quite the transformation. There has always been a lot of talent at Kroteam, but I’m glad they have finally found their true calling.

The small handful of nods to Serious Sam in The Talos Principle are quite amusing, by the way. I almost got a heart attack from suddenly hearing the sound of the headless kamikaze…

I’m currently playing through this game. At one point, it totally hit me that the non-linear structure and even the way secrets are scattered throughout the world is very reminiscent of Super Mario 64.

Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.

Were you streaming at 180mbps?

More than that, actually. I measured well over 250 over large cities. Others have reported more than 300.

That’s not how cache works.

In this case, it does. The cache for this simulator is a disk cache - and it’s completely configurable. You can manually designate its size and which parts of the world it’ll permanently contain. There’s also a default rolling cache (also on SSD - this program doesn’t even support hard drives), which does get overwritten over time.

Only the installs were slow. Terrain streaming worked just fine right from the start (I played it from day one) - and once it’s cached on your machine, they can shut down the servers all they want, it’s still on your machine.

But…that’s what you’re doing? Streaming the game at 180mbps…

No. Map and weather data is being streamed, cached on your SSD and then the game engine loads it from there into RAM and uses it in combination with other locally stored data and locally performed physics calculation to render the game on your machine. You get an uncompressed, high quality image and low-latency input, freshly baked by your graphics card for your eyes only. At 1080p and 60 fps, that’s already 2.98 Gbit/s per second generated by your GPU and sent to the screen as is. At 1440p, we are at 5.31 Gbit/s and at 4K, 11.94 Gbit/s. DisplayPort can handle up to 20 Gbit/s per lane and use up to four lanes, by the way.

Xbox Cloud Streaming only uses up to 20 Mbit/s (and that’s very optimistic). At the advertised 1080p, this means that only 6.7% as much data as generated on the server is reaching your screen.

The problem with game streaming is that in order to limit latency, they have to compress the image and send it very quickly, 60 times per second, which means they have just 16.7 milliseconds for each frame - and do this for potentially millions of users at the same time. This cannot physically be done at any decent level of quality. It is far easier to send much larger amounts of map data that is not time critical: It doesn’t matter if it’s even a few seconds late on your machine, since the game engine will render something with the data it already has. At worst, you get some building or terrain pop-in, whereas if even a single of the 60 frames required for direct game streaming is being dropped, you’ll immediately notice it as stuttering.

That sounds like a great reason not to buy this game.

If you don’t have the hardware to play this game locally, then I would not recommend it. If you have - and a base Xbox Series S is enough for a reasonable experience, which costs just 300 bucks new or about half as much used - then there is no reason for using the streaming service, unless you absolutely have to play it on your phone at work.

FS 2020 had an offline mode. I don’t see why this one wouldn’t have one as well. It’s either using procedurally generated or cached data.

You can not get the same visual fidelity and low latency with game streaming. I’ve tried nearly every service there is (going as far back as OnLive - remember that one?) and they are all extremely subpar, including Microsoft’s own game streaming service.

FS 2020 is available for streaming, by the way, and FS 2024 is likely going to be as well. You’re only getting the console version though. Officially, the resolution is “up to” 1080p, but due to extremely heavy compression, it looks far worse than that. It’s comparable to 720p at best, which means that nearly all fine detail is lost behind huge compression artifacts. On anything larger than a smartphone screen, it looks horrible. That’s on top of connection issues and waiting times that are still plaguing this service.

It’s mentioned here: https://www.flightsimulator.com/msfs2024-preorder-now-available/

”Microsoft Flight Simulator (2020) already had over two petabytes of data on the cloud. That was the whole world data.

That’s how big this game world is.

How are you going to fit two petabytes of data into a 500 gigabyte install?

FS 2020 had an offline mode. You get much lower quality terrain and no live data like weather. I’m assuming it’s the same with FS 2024.

Apples and oranges. GTA V has a small, entirely hand-built world. It’s just 80 square kilometers and was meant to fit onto two DVDs / one Blu Ray Disk. Real-world Los Angeles, which this is based on, is 1,210 square kilometers.

This Flight Simulator on the other hand covers the entire planet. If we are just going by land area, that’s 510.1 million square kilometers. It’s using a combination of satellite and aerial photography, radar maps, photogrammetry (reconstructing 3D objects - buildings and terrain in this case - from photos), Open Street Map and Bing Maps data, as well as hand-built and procedurally generated detail. There’s also information on the climate, live weather data, animal habitats (to spawn the right creatures in each part of the world), etc. pp. We are about two petabytes of data, which is an unfathomable amount outside of a data center.

You can not optimize your way out of this. The developers have the ambition to create the most detailed 1:1 virtual facsimile of this planet. There is no other way of achieving this goal. You can not store two petabytes of data on a consumer PC at the moment, you can not compress two petabytes of data to the point that they are being reduced to a couple hundred gigabytes and if your goal is accuracy, you cannot just reuse textures and objects from one city for another. That’s what every prior version of this flight simulator did, but if you remember those, the results were extremely disappointing, even for the time.

By the way, if you don’t have an active Internet connection, Flight Simulator 2020 (and 2024, if I’m not mistaken) will still work. They’ll just do what you’re suggesting, spawn generic procedurally generated buildings and other detail instead (in between a handful of high detail “hero” buildings in major cities), based on low-res satellite photography and OSM data, which is relatively small in size even for the whole planet and tells the program where a building and what its rough outline and height might be - but not what it actually looks like. Here’s a video from an earlier version of FS 2020 that shows the drastic difference: https://youtu.be/Z0T-7ggr8Tw

It is worth stressing that you will see this kind of relatively low detail geometry even with an Internet connection any time you’re flying in places where the kind of high quality aerial photography required for photogrammetry isn’t available of yet. FS 2020 has seen continuous content updates however, with entire regions being updated with higher quality photogrammetry and manually created detail every couple of months - and FS 2024 will receive the same treatment. I am generally not a fan of live-service games, but this is an exception. It makes the most sense here.

The one major downside is that eventually, the servers will be shut down. However, since you can choose to - in theory - cache all of the map data locally, if you have the amount of storage required, it is actually possible to preserve this data. It’s far out of reach for most people (we are talking low six figures in terms of cost), but in a few decades, ordinary consumer hardware is likely going to be able to store this amount of data locally. The moment Microsoft announces the shutdown of this service, people with the means will rush to preserve the data. Imagine what kind of amazing treasure this could be for future generations: A snapshot of our planet, of our civilization, with hundreds of cities captured with enough detail to identify individual buildings.

Crytek paid €140,000 for one year and one game. Denuvo is very cheap.

https://www.dsogaming.com/news/crytek-has-paid-e140000-for-using-denuvo-in-crysis-remasted-for-one-year/

Not everything is on the Internet. Even most information from as recent as the 1980s isn’t. A not insignificant percentage has been digitized (this is an ongoing effort), but this doesn’t mean you can just google it or access it through a website.

If you know where and when your ancestors lived, hit up local, regional and national archives. Church and municipal records, national surveys, newspapers (useful for announcements of births and deaths alone), school and university records, etc. You’d be surprised by how much you can find this way. If you’re living too far away to visit in person, give them a call. Archivists are very helpful people by nature and occupation.

A 2080 is still more powerful than base PS5 and Xbox Series X, so it’ll likely do fine for the rest of this console generation.

What’s the rest of your hardware like? I’m asking, because a slow CPU can rather drastically limit the performance of a GPU.

I bought an RTX 2080 last year for around 200 bucks. It’s still very competent at 1440p. There are only a few games that lock away the highest texture settings due to this card only having 8 GB of VRAM.

I would suggest looking into a used Nvidia card instead. Something like an RTX 2080 or 3080 (or one of their variants), depending on your budget. DLSS alone makes these vastly superior to anything AMD has on offer.

To be fair, the most powerful card on the market can be a bit bigger than normal. Complaining about the bulk of a high-end card is like bemoaning the poor fuel economy of a Bugatti Veyron.

You could read the article, but I’ll save you the trouble:

[T]he PC release will come enhanced with native 4K resolution at up to 144hz on compatible hardware, monitor support for both Ultrawide (21:9) and Super Ultrawide (32:9), HDR10 support, and full keyboard and mouse functionality. It will also feature NVIDIA DLSS 3.7 and AMD FSR 3.0, NVIDIA DLSS Frame Generation, adjustable draw distances, shadow quality settings and more.

Valve’s team for the store is absolutely tiny. They simply chose not to hire anyone who is qualified to deal with German bureaucracy. This is the easiest and least costly way (since it’s up to developers to self-rate their games) to comply with regulations.