Microsoft power consumption irresponsibility

Until officially fixed, you can limit your FPS in your graphics card’s control panel to prevent this problem.

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Agreed, the update mechanism really is a disaster and the overall power consumption it must generate is irresponsible.

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It’s not about individual fixes. Its about global impact and corporate responsibility.
I just saw that it was already discussed.

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Right. So the individual has no responsibility to take actions available to them to reduce their own impact on the environment? They should just sit around doing nothing until the corporations fix things for them?

It’s that kind of attitude which means we’re ultimately going to fail miserably to save our planet. We all have a responsibility to do what we can, and passing the buck ultimately helps no-one and nothing.

You mean like Microsobo are currently doing ignoring this?

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Yet another thread that will not be found by the next one wanting to report the issue.
“Microsoft power consumption irresponsibility”
“Asobo is melting the planet”

Can’t you just pick a thread title that is descriptive of the content (e.g. “Unlimited fps in Menu/Updater consuming too much power”), so that people looking for existing threads actually are able to find them?

But, hint: there is already an 8 months old(!) thread on this, to be found using the search function where you can discuss and vote this:

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Ofcourse individuals has reasonability. I limit my fps for updates, but sometimes I forget. But we are talking about Big numbers. Its a Human element that should not be there. How many people will apply workaround before update? not much.
You can influence very small number.
I agree 100% with you. but we must be realistic, one software fix eliminates this issue. Cant relay on individual responsibility. We see the results on our planet.

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Eventually, someone will get it right :slightly_smiling_face:

Soooooo “enviromental” people now want more energie consuming servers / data centers …. So THEY can download the game faster to play on THEIR energie slurping PC’s ???

Or

YOU as a consumer (and enviromental friendly person) could just wait one or 2 days to update …. So when the hype is over … u download in 1 hour … and save the planet ….

Best enviromental solution …. Less people on the world ….
( but hey … lets ignore and pretent an electric car will save us all :v:)

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I don’t believe I said anything in defence of MS or any other corporation. I merely said that a corporation failing to take action on something does not absolve others of their responsibility to do what they can on their end.

I mean, you could say that retailers are not being stopped from putting excessive, unnecessary packaging on their products. Does that mean we shouldn’t bother disposing of that packaging responsibly by recycling, and should just dump it all in general waste? Of course not.

Yes, that’s 100% absolutely true. This is definitely an issue which needs to be addressed by MS. But in the meantime we can still try and spread the word on what we can do as individuals to help. Even if only 5% of FS players actually do it, that’s still a positive impact albeit a small one. Every little helps. :slight_smile:

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Except that argument doesn’t work, because even if you have the “minimum” network speed of 5mbps, you can still spend a couple of days downloading and installing the simulator at which point your PC is working far harder than it should, thus consuming more power and reducing the usability of your PC.

Arguably this is Asobo’s fault for poor optimisation, limitations. this is Asobo’s fault for poor optimisation, limitations.

Also really ironic given five US states including Washington are starting to impose restrictions on PCs that consume high amounts of electricity, due to “environmental” concerns. I’m not sure I really buy that as the real reason for those restrictions, but ironic non the less.

Edit: One final thought - Some of this would be solved by re-writing the way we download and install updates, potentially even using an MMO style launcher for the sim. Whether they manage downloads exclusively inside of the sim or not a re-write needs to happen anyway because the download system is screwed for people.

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Now I’m not saying it will work for every card but I minimised to the taskbar and when I checked HWMonitor my gpu’s render output was zero and gpu tempratures a very normal 41°C. … Of course it’s possible there’s a setting in NVCP, Windows or even my Bios that I hadn’t disabled but I really don’t think so and it worked for at least some others too.

Also really ironic given five US states including Washington are starting to impose restrictions on PCs that consume high amounts of electricity, due to “environmental” concerns. I’m not sure I really buy that as the real reason for those restrictions, but ironic non the less.

I read the original article on The Register, and I find really hard to believe it was done for environmental reasons.

According to The Register, PC manufactured after July 1st 2021 should not consume more than 75 Kw per YEAR, which equals a recharge of a Tesla, which usually last about 3-4 days, and even less if you do longer trips.

Does it mean they are going to ban EVs due to “environmental concerns”, after spending taxpayers money to subside them ?

I read a few articles on it yesterday, one of which sighted “environmental concerns”. I’m kind of calling bull ■■■■ on that one, mainly because the bigger issue would be things like crypto mining. Honestly, I suspect if anything it’s probably more about reducing load on the power grid during high-usage seasons like hot summer days, or cold winters. But who knows :man_shrugging:

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There are millions of players logging hundreds or thousands of hours of play time each in this flight sim, CPU’s and GPU’s cranking along rendering the virtual world. Any single update is a drop in the bucket.

If you want to be environmentally responsible, go play Flight Sim for MS-DOS.

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It’s on GitHub pages, you don’t even need even need to install it :smiley:

https://s-macke.github.io/FSHistory/

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It´s up to the customer if someone uses electricity or not. Only reading a book does not consume power, having household devices does :slight_smile:

Just for fun, to the question of how many nuclear power stations it takes, let’s do some math.

My computer has a ~500W power supply and I don’t think the download took more than an hour. 0.5 kWh hour then assuming that’s all my PC was doing. Hell let’s round up to 1 whole kWh.

The nuclear plant down the way from me covered that expenditure in 0.0015544 seconds.

No, you didn’t. But you suggest it’s up to the customers to have to work around Microsobo’s poor optimization. What you suggested goes both ways. THEY have to fix their problem. It’s not up to customers to have to do this. Yes, we can, and we do. But that doesn’t absolve them from fixing the problem they created.

If Exxon creates a large oil spill, it’s not up to citizens to clean up the mess. It’s up to Exxon. Yes, people can and DO help, but imagine if Exxon brushed it off and did nothing while leaving everyday people to clean up their mess. This is analogous to what’s going on here. Albeit without the potentially deadly environmental impact.

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I really enjoyed your mathematics, it’s always fun to put numbers to a topic like this. I didn’t bother to crunch my own, however, because a) I don’t think MSFS users by itself will beak any particular camels back, and b) there are far too many unknown variables that stop us from getting a good accurate number.

With that said, rather than looking at this as an issue at scale, let’s look at it on an individual level.

Generally speaking, it is bad practice to sell and distribute a product to customers, that through your poor design choices, and or execution generates unnecessary cost for the aforementioned clients. In this case, our costs are:

  • Electricity
  • Lack of access to computing power
  • Possibly hardware health, if you have insufficient cooling provisions; and,
  • Time - If we take into account that there are definitely speed issues for downloads, even on non-patch days. It’s not a topic I’ll get into here because it is a very complex topic, but those issues exist. Some of them are Asobos fault, many of them may not be.

In normal circumstances, if a user was to buy a product from one manufacturer, but its ongoing costs were significantly higher than a competitor with a comparable product. The consumer may choose to switch, this can put pressure on producers to make their products as efficient as possible. As it stands this isn’t likely to happen here, because depending on what you are looking for you in your flight sim experience, there are no alternative options.

Still - It would be good practice to improve the user’s experience, as it helps with customer retention, and like it or not, the download system has been a mess since launch, and will continue to be. My hope is now that the big goals Microsoft have ordered Asobo to reach have no been (mainly) completed (VR, Xbox), that we will start to see improvements to things like download systems, pervasive and long-running bugs.

An improved download system would reduce the load on components, and by extension offer a reduction in power consumption. But more importantly, it would also reduce the number of people who have issues installing the sim. I was very disappointed that 11 months on since launch, two days ago I had to tell someone how to fix the file download loop because that is a bug that has been extremely pervasive, and yet one that has never been fixed.