| Leynos said: I have Google Fiber. No cloud game is allowed in this house. Physical games on real hardware only. |
What about FS2020? It's a hybrid, running locally yet fetching all the data from the cloud.
It's an interesting case actually, since bandwidth requirements for running at home can easily exceed bandwidth requirements for running the entire game in the cloud. I've measured well over 100 mbps data usage while flying over London on my laptop. On high end hardware you can increase the draw distance beyond the current max in the config files (Next patch will also allow to do it in the UI) and double the draw distance also means double the bandwidth needed to fetch the data.
Actually got my estimates for a short flight over London right here
PG Data (total downloaded, physical RAM used / VRAM used, fps, average mbps needed)
Terrain 800 5.25 GiB 14.4 / 4.5 11 fps 179 mbps
Terrain 400 3.45 GiB 15.1 / 4.1 14 fps 118 mbps
Terrain 200 2.04 GiB 12.3 / 3.5 22 fps 70 mbps
Terrain 100 1.21 GiB 10.6 / 3.7 26 fps 41 mbps
Terrain 50 0.60 GiB 9.9 / 3.5 33 fps 20 mbps
Terrain 200 is the current max (Ultra settings) yet you can increase to whatever your system can handle. As you can see, my laptop struggles plenty with London. Yet at terrain 100, bandwidth already exceeds 4K60 requirements. Even though you might have 1 gbps internet. getting a sustained 180mbps without jitter is still a much bigger ask than 35 mbps for 4K60 HDR.
If the game would run entirely in the cloud, you would have less pop in and a more stable picture. Latency isn't all that relevant for a flight sim. However if it's running in the cloud, you won't have access to usercfg.opt to increase terrain distance beyond the UI maximum. Next patch should increase the limit to 400 in the UI, which makes running the game from the cloud more interesting. Draw distance >>> latency in flight sims. And tbh, the picture FS2020 provides already looks like it was compressed due to how it handles TAA.
For FS2020 it makes more sense to run the game in the cloud. Always access to the latest data at the lowest latency. It's not just the terrain the game gets from the cloud, live weather, live traffic, ATC voices, multiplayer, the game literally talks to a dozen different servers while flying. All can have hick-ups and add stutter.
