I spent a couple of hours experimenting with rolling cache on my xbox x today, repeatedly low 500ft and slow 60kt flying over Adelaide CBD with the new photogrammetry. The reason was that I was really unhappy with the melted buildings I see and much worse stuttering since WU7. Before this there was no photogrammetry here and I got rare stutters.
My Xbox is connected by wire and I get download 65Mbps upload 25Mbps. Sadly with the ****** that the current govt did to the NBN I think that’s a pretty typical rate here.
To summarise my findings
With 50GB rolling cache, freshly created:
- many near second long freezes and even longer on occasion.
- I can see that the pg is cached as repeated overflying has less pop in where buildings get more detailed as they download, instead they more often display as detailed when revisited.
- A large proportion of buildings never get detailed, even when flying over the same small area for 30 mins, they stay melted
- I don’t get the dialogue box that says my connection is too slow for pg
- 50GB should be way more than is needed to cache Adelaide CBD, the cache seems quite inefficient and the download strategy doesn’t seem to work very well, maybe it keeps reloading the same stuff or maybe it just stops asking for the missing bits
- If it was working well then I would expect hires pg to be cached for all of CBD well within 30 mins
- Series X SSD has a read rate of about 300x faster than my download so the cache should be a massive win if it worked well
With cache turned off:
- Occasional tiny pauses/stutter, considerably less intrusive to my flying
- Buildings clearly have to download as I pass over them each time, more pop in as this happens
- More melted buildings due to lack of download bandwidth
- The connection too slow for pg dialogue pops up when over lots of buildings or sometimes even before leaving runway at YPAD, I have to click ignore. This is actually very annoying.
- Looks great from 4000ft+
I repeated these experiments a few times to make sure it was consistent.
Conclusion
RC works but not very well and causes serious pauses that can make the sim unusable. I see no reason why it shouldn’t work much more effectively than this, I think it really could do with some improvement.
I think I’m mostly going to leave it disabled since the long pauses that completely freeze the sim are worse than a few more melted buildings only visible from very low altitude.
I get that this is a flight sim and I shouldn’t be flying around at 500ft, while that’s true with fixed wing then once we get helis that is a useless argument as then low flying is a real thing.
I think that the pg in WU7 probably looks amazing if you have the bandwidth, but for those of us stuck on ■■■■■■ internet (which sadly is most of this country) it really can look very bad even to the point that it was better before the update.