I’m getting pretty tired of loading into the sim and seeing that my home base airport is downloading all of its ground textures again, the gauges on an aircraft I’ve flown multiple times are SLOOOWLY trickling in from a completely unreadable state, and although I’ve clicked “Ready To Fly”, the Simulator itself is not actually ready to fly, and I have to manually watch this pot boil until my aircraft and surroundings are in some kind of acceptable state.
At 25 mbps (the fastest available connection in this part of Trumpistan), it’s important that the cache works. But even if stuff did download quickly, I shouldn’t EVER see a gauge redownload, let alone multiple times. Simply pausing the game, causes the game to start unloading my gauges because the optimization method is so stupid it thinks these are just any other random textures and now the camera is far away from them, so they’re not needed anymore.
I’m assuming this is because 2024 is just an unfinished, broken mess, but was wondering if anyone had tips to mitigate this. Am I missing a setting? Is one of my settings not taking effect? I have my Rolling Cache size set 150 GB in the default location on C. I’ve got more than twice that free on my drive, which is a speedy m2. Yet my current data usage reports only 34 GB, and here it is still downloading everything multiple times. I’m also on the SU1 Beta, but have noted this since launch.
I also show the full 150 GB in File Explorer, but I’m assuming this is simply space that’s been allocated, not necessarily being filled by the Rolling Cache.
I have a relatively slow ADSL 27MBit/sec connection. So it should work ok. Are you getting your full ADSL speed though. Are other people maybe using/sharing that bandwidth or is your provider overrating it. I rarely see 27MBit/sec, more like 22-23MBit/sec download speeds. I do see lots of blurry airport textures (mostly runways) when the airports are streamed. It’s like they get streamed every time.
I have had better success with repeated use of the same aircraft which do seem to be cached more than the airports.
So I’m probably reading into these numbers too much, but my “Current Data Consumption” is now at 40 GB, and this is apparently what I’ve used this month? So I’d assume my Rolling Cache to not have rolled over in the past month or so, and even if is “full”, the assets I’m using now should still be in the cache. My home base airport and planes I’ve used a few times this month, should be not be downloading again.
File Explorer does indeed show the correct file size for the Rolling Cache, but Flight Simulator just automatically makes your cache file that size. It does not increase in size up to the limit as you play. It allocates the full amount as soon as you change the setting.
I’ve checked my bandwidth speeds many times and routinely get very close to my rated speed, and this would explain why the initial load is slow. But download speeds should not be the issue at all here. I’ve fully downloaded all of these textures multiple times already. I should not have to download them again.
Perhaps folks on gigabit fiber don’t notice this as often, or since they’re only flying the Fenix at altitude, their cache is “established” or working somewhat. I’ve noticed that my career aircraft, like the 172 and Caravan, eventually stopped doing this. It’s as if the cache is unloading the most recently downloaded things, or like it takes 10 or 20 downloads before it decides it’s worthy enough to be kept in the cache.
This affects me a lot less if I just use the same plane consistently. But I bought the Aviator Edition, excited to try the variety. However, every time I load a new plane, I have to go through this excruciating hassle of waiting for it to slowly download, and then watch it all crumble to dust any time the camera moves. I couldn’t even get the C-47 interior cockpit to load at all last night. It was just completely missing. Flew the C-46 instead, and today it’s as if it’s the first time I touched this plane, so I had sit there and wait for everything to download.
Thanks. I’m sure you guys discovered all of this long ago. I’m just finally getting around to ranting about it. The Rolling Cache is no doubt a minimally implemented work in progress. But this is the very cornerstone of why 2024 exists: the streaming model. It should have been a revolutionary advance that warranted the software rewrite, not a janky hack job.
Aircraft should probably have their own cache that’s independent of scenery and doesn’t ever get overwritten. But certain assets that are “autogen” should probably never be overwritten either. I mean the concrete tiles at my home airport are still re-downloading, and that’s just a recycled generic texture. Gigabytes worth of aerial imagery shouldn’t be overwriting that.
On the bright side we should be able to get to download our aircraft and 3rd party airports soon when the marketplace releases. I am a bit annoyed at having to do that again over a 27MBit/sec ADSL connection though, but FS2020 airports I already have stored locally are all DRM’d to FS2020 only so are now junk in fs2024.
Agree, that the FS2024 caching is a mystery. I have mine set at 128GB and it certainly helps, but the streamed aircraft i think are cached elsewhere locally.
back in Dec 2024 when I was seeing a lot of this slow to load cockpits, airports and scenery it was when I had a bad server connection or at busy/peak times on the server, and you can’t rule that out. This sim is 70% connection to server and 20% bandwidth I’d say from my experiences and the 10% balance is pure luck.
the cache seems to be hit and miss
if it works following a certain criteria i have no idea what that is
i have tested flying over london with an empty cache, and it downloaded around 3gb, repeat the flight inmediately after, and it downloads around 0,5gb, so it seems that it is doing at least something
but then again, i also randomly see it download things that it really should have in cache… like gauges, as you say, i have literally just used that aircraft a moment ago, and it downloads the gauges again… weird
I have 24 GB of VRAM and 64 GB of system memory so there’s no actual reason for these things to be unloading either. If there was a graphics setting that could prevent this, that would help. In 2020, there was an option to prevent culling of off-screen geometry, but I believe that in 2020 and now 2024, this option is for scenery only?
You’ve probably already seen this. I thought it was a pretty decent explanation of what many of the settings do, and how they affect performance vs. visual quality.
You’ve just make me laugh.
Trumpistan
Regarding your actual question about the working of the cache: I’m not able to help you…
My cache is 32G and it works pretty well for me.
Happy
