This is … still … a tricky question.
I did a deep dive into this topic over here:
The one line summary would be this:
- 50 to over 90% of all data written into the
RollingCache.cccfile is useless, unchanged index area!
… and … spoiler alert … the underlying issue to excessive RC index writes is still present in SU3. I will post more details in the next week or so.
However, this is most likely “only” a major performance problem for the sim.
As I explain in the linked post, the impact on the actual SSD write activity is still unclear to me … and the official Windows documentation on “FASTIO_WRITE” is not helping here.
Regarding you point …
If everything streamed (and not read from the RC) is also written someplace during use, cached data reduced write actively AND network activity.
… I think that in FS2024 this is not possible.
- Streamed data always goes into the RC
- … unless it is live traffic, or marketplace, or …
But … obviously … for airports and aircraft you can now cache manually in SU3 (aka download a package). That is outside the RC … only written once to SSD … only downloaded once over the network.
That trick, however, will not work for landscape data.
Personally I am using a 250 GB RC because it clearly does reduce the network downloads and that does clearly speed up some aspects of the sim. But then … I am a sightseeing goose and do not care about FPS … but mainly about 4K-Ultra everything photos.
I hope this somewhat answers you bullet nr. 4 questions.
And … uups … I think I did hit the “3 posts in a row” thread limit … could somebody please leave a post below this to unlock this thread for me again? Mahalo!