St Louis looks better, especially the Arch, but 5 gig in 20 minutes? At that rate, an entire day’s-worth of live TV at 1080x30fps, would take only 2 hours, 40 minutes.
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Did you check by data usage from windows? I cant tell you how many gigs per minute, I have, but after 1 week of playing I had 200 GB download.
St. Louis is photogrammetry, not sure what settings you’re on but I’d assume the higher your terrain LOD, the more it downloads. That said, I don’t download 5 gigs in a session, day, week, or even month. I’ve still not downloaded that much data since I’ve owned the sim somehow.
Who knows. With this FS24 mess, normal changes by the minute.
See that report mentioning a possible issue with data consumption : FS2024 (v1.2.7.0) - Online Data Consumption … not counting correctly
As mentioned by @K3HrN try comparing with the data usage from windows.
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That number was indicated by my service provider. I checked before I started, flew for 20 minutes and then checked again. 5 gig difference.
I did the same thing for Train Simulator World 5 and got similar numbers. The two sims seem to share a “look and feel”. 
I can’t imagine what kind of data is being pulled in those amounts.
I wonder if this download size can be improved by lowering my quality setting from medium to low.
The 5 GB number looks plausible to me … at least in my case: Ultra settings, flying from a large international airport (with lots of static airliners) and flying “slow and low” over a TIN city (for 10 minutes … which equals around 1 GB).
I did some measurements which you can find over here …
PS: I have not yet tried to quantify the difference between quality settings (e.g. Med vs Ultra).
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Could be realtistic; however, to check data consumption, its better to press windows key, and type “data consumption”, it lists the data each app has consumed.
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I am doing my data tracking with either Resource Monitor (very good for current average throughput … for each connection … filtered by process name)
… or Process Monitor, which can be downloaded from the MS App Store for free (seems to be an official MS tool for developers and sys admins). It is a very good event recording tool. And that gives me a complete recording … including an exact “total” of bytes read or written.
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sounds about right
i tested a flight direct from london city to heathrow and it was 3gb just that small hop
photogrammetry’s files are gigantic
i think they shouldn’t be, or at least they shouldn’t be that big
and i think that is a big chunk of the reason for many of the sim’s problems, how gigantic everything is
Well, they are pretty normal bitmap files with some small data files attached. If you want them smaller, the resolution will be lower, and things will not look that nice. There is no magical way to make them smaller and keep the same quality (yes, they are compressed already).
But if you want them smaller, lower your setting, and it’s done!
Five gigabytes for a complete photogram city with 3d objects sounds pretty normal; in fact it is not really high-detail in that case. I have worked on projects where just Manhattan was 45Gb. For reference, a single detailed airport has a photo base (so without any objects) that easily exceeds 10 Gb in some cases. It is easy to forget that if you double the resolution, you quadruple the file size. Just a bit more detail can explode a bitmap’s size.
Mathijs Kok
PMDG
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So, the consensus here seems to be that 15Gig/hour is expected over a city? That’s a MASSIVE amount of data. Texture bitmaps will certainly be larger for “better image quality” but looking at the detail I’m ACTUALLY SEEING, 15Gig PER HOUR seems just too much. Seriously, if you’re in fog for example, you might not even SEE most of the detail that’s downloaded.
I can’t imagine needing that kind of detail while FLYING. In fact, cities, buildings, objects, don’t look that different from 2020. The primary modelling difference is trees, although tree height is STILL an issue. The most noticeable visual change is in light calculation. It shifts the color palette.
In my attempt to justify the data rate I came up with three issues. One consideration is the “efficiency” of the data transfer. Compression helps but required raw data is simply a fact of life. Another thing is, what level of detail is required for GAMING? I don’t need detailed doorknobs on buildings I’ll never get close enough to see. How about individual LOD switches for airports and cities? Lastly, how much can I keep cached on my computer? Why does it take six minutes just to get to the START SCREEN?
If the powers that be are attempting to push me into unlimited data plans, I will disappoint them. I will simply adjust my usage.
$0.02
So lower your setting! That’s what they are there for.
Technically spoken, the amount of data is not abnormal for what the simulator tries to do. There is an excellent article about that here: Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 PC performance testing and settings analysis — we tested 23 GPUs, the game is even more demanding than its predecessor | Tom's Hardware
5 GByte is 40000 Mbit
20 minutes is 1200 seconds
40000 / 1200 = 33.3 Mbits per second.
Seems to be ok (provided I didn’t screw up my calculation).
Personally I would not work with that assumption.
So far my measurements (all done at “Ultra everything”) suggest … approx:
- 1 to 2 GB for the active aircraft
- 5 GB for a major international airport … with lots of static “Ultra” aircraft
- 1 GB per 10 minutes … “low and slow” over a TIN area (e.g. LA)
- 0.5 GB per 10 minutes … 70 ktas and low above ground over normal flat landscape (e.g. in Illinois)
- 0.25 GB per 10 minutes … 70 ktas and 2,500 ft above ground over normal flat landscape (e.g. in Illinois)
PS: The above is in conditions where I do not run into obvious bandwidth limitations or warnings.
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That’s interesting. So flying low and slow over a highly detailed city requires that much data to simulate what I previously saw in '20? Keep in mind that the difference in “tone”, the result of shifting the way light is calculated, probably accounts for 75-80% of the visual difference.
GPU tests and bytes/sec calculations not withstanding, I don’t see a reference being set by what is actually happening IN the sim. What can possibly require 33300000/8 ~= 4 megabytes (on average) every second? I don’t see enough detail difference (re '20) to account for even going to the cloud.
I don’t want to return to '20 because it seems that the simConnect interface is more complete in '24. Half the fun I’m having is coding features and interfacing tablets and other custom input devices.
OTOH, I probably spend way too much time on this hobby.
The ground textures and photogrammetry modeling should be the exact same streaming cost as in 2020.
The aircraft, airports, and terrain data are now streamed the first time you use them (or again, if not in cache) in 2024 whereas previously they were downloaded during that massive 150GB installation, which you’re presumably not counting in your figures for network activity during playtime.
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I have a good idea wrt data caching, etc. I still can’t fathom the six minute download at each startup.
I note that my '24 cache was set to 0.0 which to me says, “No cache”. I changed that setting to 30.0. As I type this, it has been twenty minutes and all I see is a window saying something like, “…I’m doing the cache thing, it could take several minutes, please don’t shut me down”. It says “100%” but there is no cancel or continue button, just the spinner in the LRHC. I’m going to need to shut it down soon.
Update: I’m looking at Task Manager. Is this thing grabbing where I’ve been and DLing that? It’s eating Gigabytes right now. I didn’t ask for that! I would’ve thought the cache would start caching when set to non-zero. I’m going to shut it down. Hopefully it won’t break anything.
Update: After restarting I see that turning on that cache just ate 20Gig of the 50 or so I had left in my LIMITED DATA PLAN. What was it downloading? Now I’m afraid to restart the sim.
Thanks for wasting my data!
Update: Finally got a chance to retry the sim. It started and showed no issues. The cache was reset to 0.0 and there’s a 16Gig .CCC file where you’d expect it to be. The only damage was the wasted 20Gig.
Update 2: Several low and slow flights above familiar terrain and I must give credit to the team for the improvement of the out-the-window scenery visuals. It appears the entire earth is now hi-res bitmapped and that the 3D terrain has much higher resolution. The general lighting, sun, streetlights, are almost beautiful, not real, but a very fine painting. I still question the gigantic data sizes but I do now better understand the tradeoffs required to implement the improvements.
One of the most significant improvements is the smoothness. Except for heavy use internet jam-ups, which are fairly obvious, the sim is smooth as water even on my not-the-most-powerful 9900k/2080. The flight models all seem greatly improved as well. (Or maybe I finally just calibrated all the external HW mess. BTW, hall sensors really are better than potentiometers.)
Update 3: The good news is that my total HW freeze running '24 appears to have been fixed. I forgot that they raised the minimum RAM size to 32G. Bought and installed 16G and no freezes so far.
While monitoring memory usage I noticed that '24 is constantly downloading data during simulation, even if I sit in the parking space, unmoving. I have multiplayer and all other on-line stuff set to off yet '24 keeps downloading megabytes. Anyone know what data this is?
I’m also finding issues where SimConnect code which worked in '20 does not work in '24. Further, new simconnect_xxx calls are not found by the VS2019 compiler even though I’ve updated the SDK from within the developer menu. Am I missing something about changes to these functions?
Happy flying!
False, Terrain data in 2020 is also streamed