Asobo halves Flight Simulator download, but process still seems inefficient – Gaming – News

Asobo Studios has reduced the initial download of Microsoft Flight Simulator from around 170GB to 83GB. It doesn’t say how it achieves that, but most likely it applied more or better compression. However, the download process still seems inefficient.

Game maker Asobo Studios makes in the patch notes of version 1.16.2.0 saving notification. An installation of the basic edition of Microsoft Flight Simulator, including all files needed to play the game and without Marketplace downloads, takes up approximately 96GB after decompression. According to an column on Bit-Tech it was still 115GB at the time of the game’s release. The occupied space can still grow when the game landscapes are in rolling cache saves. Asobo Studios notes 150GB of free space in the system requirements.

Downloading and decompressing takes turns instead of simultaneously

The change was made to save bandwidth as well as user time. What is striking, however, is that this initial download does not use the Internet connection, the storage medium and the processor at the same time. What the game does instead is download the game files, the chunks temporarily store it in working memory and periodically transfer it to the drive, and when a file is completely downloaded, decompress it while the internet connection does nothing. That process would go faster if all the resources were used as much as possible at the same time.

That behavior is different with, for example, the Epic Games Launcher or Steam. These programs use the internet connection, storage media and processor simultaneously, so that downloading and extracting the data together takes less time. Although Microsoft Flight Simulator is on Steam, among others, the lion’s share of the data to be downloaded is downloaded within the game client.

It is unknown why Asobo Studios chose the download process in question and whether there are any obstacles to further efficiency steps.

Microsoft Flight Simulator came out for Windows in August 2020 and is set to come to Xbox Series X and S this summer.