MS Flight SIM 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of bandwidth in flight | Hacker News Reader

MS Flight SIM 2024 sucks up to 180 Mb/s of bandwidth in flight

tomshardware.com

13 pointsLorenDB16 comments

This is great for me as an Australian because the past government changed the NBN from fibre to copper and instead of gigabit the fastest I can get is 25mbps that doesn't work when it's raining.

But no it's okay because they told me nobody would ever need more than 25 megabit ever. No possible application for greater speeds would ever be thought up, they assured us.

The government always knows the right solution don't they! We really should put them in charge of everything.

My understanding is that the progressive party in Australia had a plan to bring fiber to a lot more of the country, and then the conservative regime that followed it basically demolished the plan to benefit a private corporation (Foxtel) owned by Rupert Murdoch.

So it seems the government was doing something good, but then the conservative party took power and was partially in the pocket of Rupert Murdoch, partially just against the government doing something useful.

The government can't do anything right when you elect people who believe the government can't do anything right.

Or, in other words, stop listening to Rupert Murdoch.

Fast internet won't help you build houses or sell rocks to China.

Wrong on both counts, in Australia at least - fast internet makes possible remote telepresence on brick laying robots and semi autonomous haul paks .. both of which we have here in Western Australia.

https://www.riotinto.com/en/mn/about/innovation/automation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6IQB5S1N5I

Fast internet increases the percentage of the country that's desirable to live in, which is an incentive for people to move there and demand new housing be built.

The more desirable small towns and rural places are, the less of a housing crunch there is. A lot of housing supply issues are due to rapid urbanization over the last few decades.

Big cities have skyrocketing housing prices while some small towns are literally paying people to move there.

You're correct of course, but that level of strategic thinking is well beyond those in charge. David Horne summed the situation up well.

"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people's ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise."

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lucky_Country

oh boy! but the scenery is stunning. jaw dropped on game play video (MSFS 2024 Technical Alpha) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QWiA-j20_w

disclosure: not an active gamer

If it is not procedurally generated terrain the data has to come in sometime, either beforehand or just in time. This looks like a worst case scenario. Fast flight over densly structired terrains with zero precaching at higest detail settings?

This is as much a non-story as saying 'Downloading an ISO sucks up to 180Mbs of bandwidth', of course it does, if you don't limit the download rate, it will use whatever it can, to get it done the fastest.

Forgive my ignorance, is this game being rendered remotely and streamed to the client? If so, I can’t say I find those numbers too extraordinary. 4K+ streaming moves a lot of bits.

Streaming the terrain/image world data. You can fly anywhere in the world so it's basically streaming Google Maps satellite view as you fly around.

I know video streamers cheap out on bandwidth, but 180Mbps is about four times larger than a full fidelity 4k encoding, no?

Also, if anybody else was pushing this bandwidth on Azure it'd bankrupt them. I presume Microsoft are giving themselves an anticompetitive advantage (instead of making their fees fairer).

2160x3840x8 per frame uncompressed, for 8 bit video... Even at 24fps that exceeds 1 Gbps.

So "full fidelity" means ~8:1 compression ratio? At 60 fps it's closer to 4 Gbps so ~20:1?

Not to mention 8 bit video is not great and susceptible to banding as well as in general already concidered compressed in color space even when "uncompressed".

You can probably get away with streaming it at that quality but by any of my definitions it's not close to high fidelity.

Sorry, full fidelity was lax terminology. What I really meant using a modern lossy codec (e.g. AV1 or H.265) at a high bitrate, so there is no perceptible loss.

I was under the impression 50Mbps was very good, even for 10-bit HDR 4K.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com