Why is that surprising? A compressed video stream is obviously smaller than actual textures and mesh data of the entire planet. You can’t compare the two.

Also NVidia doesn’t produce the stream out of thin air. They are running the game on their own servers then compress the final image and send it to you over the net. While MS sends you the actual game data like meshes and textures and you compute the screen image on your own machine. It’s not the same. What Nvidia is doing is expensive since for every client that connects they need a graphics card, a cpu and a SSD running in a server farm. If MS would do it that way you have to pay a subscription fee to play Flight Simulator. What MS does is just sending files. Since bandwidth is obviously exponentially cheaper than spinning up an instance of the game on a server for every customer they’ve decided to do it this way. So you only have to pay once.

[–] Aatube@kbin.melroy.org 3 points 3 weeks ago

continuing in https://lemmy.world/comment/12892907

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 3 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

GeForce now does not stream the entire game to you. That's the whole point of GeForce now, it just streams you the final render. Which is just 1 image, though at 60 per second. Which is way less than all the terrain data, textures, meshes, etc in multiple square kms of map data. Ever wonder why modern AAA games are 90+gb big? Thats all the assets that Microsoft streams to you in their flight sim. The actual code is only a few 10's/100's mb. Now imagine an AAA game that covers the whole earth and how much space those assets would take up. Hence why they have to stream it to you to make you even capable of playing this game.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

They do not have to stream it. PC hard drives come in the multiples of TB these days.

[–] dev_null@lemmy.ml 2 points 2 weeks ago

What makes you think it isn't an option? Most people probably aren't using it though, because there is no reason to predownload terabytes of world data when you aren't going to come near 95% of it.

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 2 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

You have to download it anyway. If you have the space you can probably specify a high cache volume. Then after a while the streaming would slow down. So whether you download it upfront or during gameplay. In the end it's more or less the same amount of data. So the whole data cap point is pretty moot. Unless your storage is low and it keeps clearing the cache. But then you wouldn't be able to play in the other situation at all, or very limited.

And let's be fair, if your ISP has a data cap less that 10s of TB (or at all) they are scamming you big time. Yay for monopolies eh?

Edit: Thinking about it, streaming the data probably would cause a lower data usage as they can apply LOD tricks and culling, etc. Which they wouldn't be able to do when you have to pre-download it.

[–] Maggoty@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Unpacking compressed files will always be cheaper in Internet usage. And if they wanted to go this direction they could have just streamed the output for far cheaper usage as well.

They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.

[–] Decq@lemmy.world 1 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago)

First of all, the textures probably are already compressed, so compressing them more doesn't do all that much. Secondly, streaming is just downloading, so you can just compress the stream. Sure you might lose a little bit of compression possibility when you don't present it as one big archive. But that probably saves way less than the tricks I mentioned before.

They literally picked the highest bandwidth way to do this.

No they did not, you have to download it either way.... And streaming the render output is not at all the same as rendering locally on your own PC. Neither as an user experience nor as a cost benefit for Microsoft.