I Don't Use Rolling Cache Anymore

Yes, I have seen articles about the Arc GPU’s… Thanks for the reminder to stay tuned.

2 petabytes = 2000000GIB

There is a basic truth storage providers and even battery providers have had to deal with. A pint pot will only hold 1 pint.
Now of course you can compress the data but in the end you can still only store one pint in a pint pot.

you believe that detail will be even more detailed in future and 2 petabytes ‘wont touch it’.
So at this point I am trying to visualise what this storage would look like. The energy it would require to maintain. Even if with the most aggressive compression methods yet to be invented, I think your ‘future’ view is a very long way off.
What kind of compression would be required I wonder to make it remotely practical for home users?

Harddrives used to be comparatively huge energy guzzlers, now not so much and there’s probably still some room left for further miniturisation … and of course fusion energy is finally making progress, I just hope we don’t fry the whole climate with it.

Interesting, Cloud Computing still “Novel”…
Same concept used in the 60’s and 70’s . The display is here and the data/processing done remotely.
Cloud Computing = A Local Dumb Terminal and A Remote Main Frame or Mini Computer. About the only thing novel about the cloud computing concept is the distance between the devices. Still, I agree with you, Embraced by some, shunned by others and that cycle continues.

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Yes novel or should I say in it’s infancy … time is infinite and in another dimension we are no more than ants scuttling around a giant beach ball.

PS. Pray for the whales :pray:

Hard drive energy consumption seems to have stabilized at 4 watts, no matter the size. So I would save 32 watts by swapping out my 8 4tb NASware hard drives (less than a year old) for 2 16 tb hard drives. With 12 data/power connectors in my case, I could easily do 10 x 20 tb, for a decent fractional petabyte storage box (200 tb), for $5k Canadian today.

Not that I have a use for that much storage - not yet. But you never know … and prices will come down even more.

When it comes to physical space 15.36TB M.2 drives are available even now (but you might have to sell your house to afford them :wink:)

Edit: Bing’s whole planet would likely need about 150 of them … (and a very big fan to keep them cool)

Keep in mind that while MSFS just celebrated 40 years on the PC platform Xbox support was just released in 2021.

This is not even physically possible. The PC didn’t exist 40 years ago. I was one of the people who played it on a non-PC platform. Demographically, it was (1) a very small user base, and (2) a quarter of us are dead. Lots of people die before 65 - like 27%.

Computers were a strange thing back then.

Now? The younger demographic have lives, wives, and 9 to 5s. For the price of building a decent gaming PC, they can buy an XBox X and a 75" 4k Smart TV, and they can justify the monster TV since it becomes their digital entertainment center, movies, games, tv shows. With plenty of 2-person games available. So everyone in the household is happy.

And it comes with a warranty that it all works. Home brew PCs don’t.

Even today, when assembling a PC is much simpler, people still mess it up, fry components, buy incompatible parts, try to force the wrong ram into the socket (seen it - they actually succeeded, the ram had a bend in it, but of course the machine wouldn’t boot).

Unless you have a separate reason to build your own PC, it doesn’t make sense. If I didn’t have a reason to build my monster machine, I wouldn’t have considered gaming or MSFS. Those days were a couple of decades ago.

Today people buy a lot more pre-built gaming PCs and game consoles than build their own. Most PC sales aren’t for running games - they’re for business and home office (WFH - work from home) use. Those home office PCs might run games - but not a hog like MSFS. And the average person has never heard of MSFS 2020 so THEY won’t be building a PC to run it.

It’s a simple fact - the early tech adopters are, by definition, older. Much older. And much fewer.

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My message will be short.

It’s not true that having the cache mode on is always good. If you don’t need it - don’t use it.

I have a 400Mb/s connection and my sim run WAY better WITHOUT the rolling cache - Solved all my stuttering issues and increased performance. Exact same thing with a friend we fly often together.

And, not it was not because of my drive. MSFS has his dedicated Nvme 2tb drive, on which the rolling cache was installed.

Many here says the rolling cache is good, just because it sounds logical - please experiment by yourself.

Rolling cache is for those with a lower end bandwidth.

See IBM article regarding the intro for the IBM PC

Also, Microsoft has heavily advertised the 40th anniversary edition of MSFS 2020 released 11/22.

To further complicate the “cache: good or bad?” issue is the apparent fact that not all PG is created equal. The cache seems more useful in some areas for me.

I had to delete my rolling cache a few months back because I had updated my video driver and I had horrible stutters/pauses until I deleted and later re-enabled the cache. I’ve been flying with it ever since.

If it helps you - great. If you can’t see any difference - don’t use it.

P.S.: I envision a future where AI will have learned why a cloud looks the way it does and why a field looks the way it does and why a given body of water looks the way it does… all the bits used to save an incorrect color of an instantaneous look at a given location won’t be needed for flight simulation. Maybe they’d be needed for other purposes - I don’t know… but 2 peta bytes might be replaced by (however much space an AI takes up).

You couldn’t buy a PC on the official release date of the PC. And flight sim didn’t run on those early PCs - no graphics card. The “40 years ag” PC version was officially released in November 1982, but it takes time to get stock into the distribution channel - it was all shipping physical boxes to distributors who then shipped it to sub-distributors who shipped it to retail companies, who shipped it to their stores. So there was no way they had stock in the store on the release date of November 1982. Maybe early 1983, but definitely NOT November 1982. Which is the claim. Nobody got anything on the shelves on release date in those days.

I’m not sure how to respond to this. Happy flying!

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CGA was available at PC launch (Byte wrote an article early 1982!), Hercules MDA cards came a little later. To state that there were no graphics cards is simply not true.

It hardly matters as in those days onboard graphics were every bit or even more powerful than early addon cards which were only invented to upgrade older machines. My father had a Commodore franchise (before they cleaned him out) and IBM later, after school/college it was my brother and I that brought his old stock up to date. They were pretty much all for business (Commodore 32/64 excepted) and proper gaming PC’s came later. For gaming throughout the eighties there was little choice but for Nintendo or Atari consoles, everything else was bespoke.

Back to topic: The rolling cache can be useful for some but if not ideally placed can introduce stutters e.g. when new scenery loads in. The only golden rule is keep it off the drive where your MSFS content is.

The original PC was barely useful for office work, never mind gaming. The CGA was terrible, prone to “video snow”, and was 4 colours (one being black) at 320x200. Typing on the PC was a chore if you were a touch-typist - you could only type a few letters, then wait for them to appear on the screen. Scrolling? Slow.

Nobody bought the original PC for gaming. There were already established competitors (Radio Shack, Commodore) with much better gaming computers at 1/6 the price, including the operating system (embedded in ROM, so booted VERY fast, unlike booting DOS off a floppy), external floppy drive and Flight Simulator itself. And hard drives for the early PC just added a lot more to the cost.

IBM was marketing the PC as a business computer, because it was a real laggard for anything else. If you wanted to do graphics work, you bought a Mac. Gaming, you bought one of the home computers with the embedded keyboard.

Yes, a lot of people bought PCs - but not with a CGA adapter. Not even the MDA (monochrome display adapter). I really liked my Hercules mono adapter - much faster screen updates, added a second parallel port, and you could store 8 pages of text in it’s ram and switch between pages really quickly (like, 1/60 of a second).

The people who bought the initial PC for the home were mostly people hoping to sell programs to businesses - hence the proliferation of programs for video store rentals at the time. But gaming? Why, when it was so much cheaper to buy a superior gaming machine from an established vendor?

Gaming only really came on it’s own with the introduction of the VGA screen (the EGA still couldn’t compete unless you upgraded it’s ram or bought from the 3rd party vendors who recognized a market gap and designed cards to fill it).

And of course, you needed to buy a special monitor for either the CGA or EGA or VGA, whereas the “game computers” could just plug into your 27" TV.

There’s a reason why both Windows 95 and OS/2 Warp dropped support for anything less than a VGA output - lower modes were awful, and only tolerated because there were no real options.

Ask anyone who was around at the time - CGA was garbage.

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Thats right, cheer us all up :scream:

uh, no it wasnt and I was there 256 colours. But it was horses for courses. There was no real business need for colour. Screen resolution wasnt that great then.
Office computers did best green on black etc.
I recall installing back in 1985 desktop computers throughout the company. They were compatibles each had a 20MGB hard disk (which sounds silly now but you need to consider that a word document if it was 4K was already a substantial document.
So colour wasnt really a point. Each computer also had an emulation card fitted so it could act as a ‘dumb’ terminal linked to an IBM System 38 , later AS400. We used office packages like Lotus, Quattro etc.
(A bit of a shock when I saw them displayed in the Science Museum in London as the old stuff. Talk about feeling old)
but all this was efficient, affordable, each macine we bought for less than 700 bucks, and right for the job then required.
Floppy disks became a major expense until I ordered them with the company logo and name printed on the ‘slide’. They then stopped dissapearing which also tells you that lots of people had computers at home.

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We rarely throw barbs and arrows on this forum, so I’ll apologize in advance, but I can’t help saying that your pronouncement is flat-out misinformation that the moderators should catch and ban. I’d guess that a very large percentage of folks on the forum are using home-built PCs for MFS, maybe even a majority, and you won’t find any posts about their failure to “work.” Folks savvy enough to build their own PCs are almost always smart enough to get them right the first time and successfully troubleshoot any problems that arise. People who try to force DIMMs into incompatible slots are much more likely to be folks who bought their PC at Best Buy.

possibly true but not necessarily for Flight Simulator users

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