this post was submitted on 15 Oct 2024
409 points (91.1% liked)
Games
32579 readers
1469 users here now
Welcome to the largest gaming community on Lemmy! Discussion for all kinds of games. Video games, tabletop games, card games etc.
Weekly Threads:
Rules:
-
Submissions have to be related to games
-
No bigotry or harassment, be civil
-
No excessive self-promotion
-
Stay on-topic; no memes, funny videos, giveaways, reposts, or low-effort posts
-
Mark Spoilers and NSFW
-
No linking to piracy
More information about the community rules can be found here.
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
They do not have to stream it. PC hard drives come in the multiples of TB these days.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.