Also don’t buy this because like the previous flight simulator, they will restrict you to slow Microsoft servers so your first 150 hours in-game will actually just be downloading additional content at whatever speed Microsoft has limited their servers. 5MBPs? Maybe sometimes!
Because GTA has 99.99% of the data on disk. MFS2024 is trying to keep the install size from being 500 GB, so rather than having the whole world on your PC they are streaming it in. GTA doesn’t do that.
Because everything has to fit on the average game PC or console storage, they have some pressure to optimize data size. A simulator that streams everything have less constraints on data size, less motivation to keep size reasonable.
GTA 5’s entire game world is just the San Andreas area. The point of MFS2024 is that you can literally see your real world house from the air. It’s so, so, so much larger than GTA 5’s < 100 km2 it’s a totally unfair comparison.
I’m not suggesting putting the whole world on a 120GB disk.
That being said, most of the textures and building geometries used for San Andreas may be reused for other cities in the west coast. Areas between cities that have a lower density could take much less space.
So doubling the physical area covered doesn’t necessarily require doubling the amount of data. But the bandwidth usage from MSFT’s simulator suggest they are not reusing data when they could be.
Yeah, you’re not getting the goal. They are using actual data from the areas you’re flying over. You’re suggesting they look at it like a game, where the reuse textures and models. Their goal is the opposite, to have the game look like the real world.
Even in MFS2020 my house roughly look like my house, and the taller structures look like they do in my city, they aren’t just skyscraper#93781 and bridge#12381, they are all unique structures that uses the bing maps data to look just like it does in real life. The landmarks in my city are my cities landmarks. They aren’t just generic buildings.
I happen to know a bit about game and simulators. From a plane’s point of view, houses dont look unique. A small number of models is enough to fairly represent most houses. There may be a minority of structures that are really unique (stadiums, bridges, landmarks, …) but the vast majority of buildings aren’t unique. Even if two building have different heights, it’s possible to reuse textures if they’re built from the same material.
MSFT appears to have designed the simulator by considering every building is unique, but if they compared buildings and textures, ideally using automation, they would see there’s a massive amount of duplication.
The fact that you started by comparing it to GTA 5 makes it obvious you don’t know, but okie dokie, at this point I have to assume you’re just trolling.
Apples and oranges. GTA V has a small, entirely hand-built world. It’s just 80 square kilometers and was meant to fit onto two DVDs / one Blu Ray Disk. Real-world Los Angeles, which this is based on, is 1,210 square kilometers.
This Flight Simulator on the other hand covers the entire planet. If we are just going by land area, that’s 510.1 million square kilometers. It’s using a combination of satellite and aerial photography, radar maps, photogrammetry (reconstructing 3D objects - buildings and terrain in this case - from photos), Open Street Map and Bing Maps data, as well as hand-built and procedurally generated detail. There’s also information on the climate, live weather data, animal habitats (to spawn the right creatures in each part of the world), etc. pp. We are about two petabytes of data, which is an unfathomable amount outside of a data center.
You can not optimize your way out of this. The developers have the ambition to create the most detailed 1:1 virtual facsimile of this planet. There is no other way of achieving this goal. You can not store two petabytes of data on a consumer PC at the moment, you can not compress two petabytes of data to the point that they are being reduced to a couple hundred gigabytes and if your goal is accuracy, you cannot just reuse textures and objects from one city for another. That’s what every prior version of this flight simulator did, but if you remember those, the results were extremely disappointing, even for the time.
By the way, if you don’t have an active Internet connection, Flight Simulator 2020 (and 2024, if I’m not mistaken) will still work. They’ll just do what you’re suggesting, spawn generic procedurally generated buildings and other detail instead (in between a handful of high detail “hero” buildings in major cities), based on low-res satellite photography and OSM data, which is relatively small in size even for the whole planet and tells the program where a building and what its rough outline and height might be - but not what it actually looks like. Here’s a video from an earlier version of FS 2020 that shows the drastic difference: youtu.be/Z0T-7ggr8Tw
It is worth stressing that you will see this kind of relatively low detail geometry even with an Internet connection any time you’re flying in places where the kind of high quality aerial photography required for photogrammetry isn’t available of yet. FS 2020 has seen continuous content updates however, with entire regions being updated with higher quality photogrammetry and manually created detail every couple of months - and FS 2024 will receive the same treatment. I am generally not a fan of live-service games, but this is an exception. It makes the most sense here.
The one major downside is that eventually, the servers will be shut down. However, since you can choose to - in theory - cache all of the map data locally, if you have the amount of storage required, it is actually possible to preserve this data. It’s far out of reach for most people (we are talking low six figures in terms of cost), but in a few decades, ordinary consumer hardware is likely going to be able to store this amount of data locally. The moment Microsoft announces the shutdown of this service, people with the means will rush to preserve the data. Imagine what kind of amazing treasure this could be for future generations: A snapshot of our planet, of our civilization, with hundreds of cities captured with enough detail to identify individual buildings.
Thanks for the interesting details. Glad to see there’s an offline version that disables photogrammetry.
The church in england is a good example where a a generic rectangle building model doesn’t work. They could improve the offline version by adding a church model in the set of offline models, and use it for 90% of church in western Europe.
A fully realistic model of every single building may be cool for architects, future historians, city planners, gamers that are sightseeing… but don’t help much when learning to pilot. Having a virtual world that look similar to the real one, with buildings of the right size and positions, landmarks, and hero buildings is good enough, and doesn’t require that much resources. There are others parts of flight simulators that are more important to work on.
Small clarification: Satellite imagery is only used where higher quality aerial photography isn’t available. For cities with full photogrammetry, a plane needs to fly over the whole area twice (the second time at 90 degrees relative to the first pass) in order to capture buildings from all sides.
At that point, people were curious and decided to go deeper into the engine. Low and behold, it’s a game engine, based entirely on telemetry technology.
That’s interesting and all, but I still don’t see a reason to upgrade my PS5 to a Pro, and frankly it wouldn’t even be that interesting for the price as a new player either.
Are there like any games that will really make use of the new hardware? Other than perhaps upgraded framerates and better 4K support. The average console player probably isn’t going to care that much, not for the giant price increase over minimal gains.
I feel like all games on this generation will still be limited to the base PS5 anyway, can’t imagine hardware matters much until the next generation consoles.
I know, but I was being impatient before. Ragnarok is already on PC and I kinda forgot about it. I’ll look into it once a sale hits, but even then it’ll be a debate with myself over the psn stuff.
People who don’t have a gaming PC but still want to game would be the next target audience in line, since they wouldn’t have another machine to play third-party games on anyway, so the exclusive would just be a bonus on top.
But I don’t think they’re even interested in paying so much extra for features they don’t even care about. Perhaps a smooth high framerate in casual shooters would be something they’d care for, but that can easily be achieved on base PS5 with at least 60+ FPS. I don’t think they’re the ones that care about true 4K, 120Hz/FPS or slightly better textures.
The only thing I can think of that people are hyped up for is GTA6. I fear that Rockstar might sell out to Sony and deliver a shitty 30FPS locked, low resolution and texture version of the game on older PS5 models on purpose, just to “push the hardware” of the newest model. But then again, they also couldn’t even be arsed to unlock framerate for RDR2 on PS5, not even after so many years.
I’m already decided. I’m not buying GTA 6. And GTA 6 was the whole reason I bought the PS5 to begin with.
Over the past year I’ve seen how rockstar are making moves to make GTA 6 even more of a pay to win multiplayer experience, and less focused on the $60 single player experience. All of this at a $60 or more price point to start with I’m sure.
If you want to be pay to win, you can’t also be AAA pricepoint to buy the game. I personally don’t play pay to win games, but when you charge for the base game it goes from being a sketchy game mechanic, to being an outright scam.
You know what I’m playing right now on PS5? Transportation Fever 2. Fuck off Rockstar. You lost me as a lifelong customer since the first GTA on PS1.
I haven’t read much into GTA 6 so far, only seen the trailer basically.
I do hope the singleplayer will still be as good as previous games, although I definitely would expect them to try and cash in on online even more.
T2 and Rockstar definitely fucked up with GTA 5 too. Originally there were supposed to be singleplayer expansions. Which they of course dropped in favor of how popular online got. And then they even proceeded to ban mods that took multiplayer-only cars to singleplayer, fucking disgusting move.
I’ll wait and see how the singleplayer is. I never bought GTA5 for its multiplayer, it only got less appealing the more they added to it too. The only part that interested me much later on were the RP servers, it genuinely looked fun on some of the moderated ones, so maybe Rockstar will try to get into that, but if online is just a carbon copy of GTA5 I won’t even bother.
I think you can expect about the same as with the PS4 Pro. Maybe finally this time it will be a smooth actual 4k (ok actually, UHD) gaming experience. But that’s kinda what we said last time too, so I don’t know.
Developers would still have to optimize their games to get the most out of the hardware, unless we’re talking about a game that was already performing suboptimal and throwing raw power at it will hide the surface level problems so it looks smoother.
I would love to see all this horsepower being used to actually make the games better by design, like pathfinding and NPC behaviour. The last big breakthrough we had was raytracing, which proved that it wasn’t photorealism that makes it look better, but accurate lighting and shadows. For the consoles it was using an SSD for almost instant loading times.
But I digress. I’m not upgrading my PS5 either, but I can see the value for power users that play competitively or something.
There is a PS5 version with no disc drive. You can even currently buy a disc drive for it, buy the disc version side plates, remove your discless sideplate, connect the disc drive, and then attatch the disc drive version of the side plates…and you have the disc version of ps5 that they would have sold you in stores.
Interesting in their choice of TFLOPS announcement. They could’ve simply claimed 33 and put an asterisk for FP16 performance on the precision and called it a day. They’re listing AMD’s FP32 spec, which is divergent from Ampere/Ada which has the same output regardless of precision.
There will be a single digit number of games for it and all of them will require subscriptions to play and half of them will be canceled +/- 2 months from launch and then impossible to play because the servers are shut down.
How many PS5 Pros will be sold at retail, taken out of the package, hooked up to a TV, and never play a game that you could play on a normal PS5 or even a PS4?
Oh the 16gigs is for devs/games and the 2gb is exclusively for the system. Was wondering how they were able to get by with only 2 gigs of ram and 16gigs of vram originally lmao.
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