this post was submitted on 07 Mar 2024
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Gaming

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[–] IdiosyncraticIdiot 80 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Alt title: ISPs attempt to avoid infrastructure upgrades unless paid for by others; points fingers.

Nothing new tbh.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago

They hardly even do it when paid for others in the US at least. Gotta love bare minimums and lobbying to make those minimums really low.

[–] [email protected] 40 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Gaming uses extremely little bandwidth.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 5 months ago

Software updates can take quite a bit of bandwidth though. Call of Duty updates are significant events on the network, at the scale of streaming major sporting events.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Read the 2nd sentence of the article. They are talking about 120gb CoD patches

[–] [email protected] 9 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Still not a big deal. Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist. Ads, spam, and crawlers totally eclipse this traffic. This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Literally why CDNs and bitorrent tech exist

Neither of these reduces the amount of bandwidth an end user requires to download a 120gb file. If anything torrenting makes it more problematic because the upload is spread amongst a dozen low density residential users rather than a single high throughput datacenter

This is just the ISPs posturing to raise rates.

Ya absolutely. Doesn't change the fact that 'gaming uses very little bandwidth' is only considering the UDP packets sent during an online gaming session and ignoring all the other sources of usage.

I literally have 5-10gb of updates queued up the first time I open steam nowadays

[–] [email protected] -1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

That's still not that much data. Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth. Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago)

That's still not that much data

Gaming is 10-20% of the ISPs total network load, and the MW3 launch constituted like a 110% increase over base network load, so yes it's a lot of data.

Advertisements and crawlers constantly use up far more bandwidth.

Crawlers rely on private connections between datacenters, very little of that traffic touches residential ISPs

Fight the real problems instead of blaming the users.

Literally no one is blaming users - There are plenty enough reasons to hate most ISPs, we don't have to make up facts to find new ways to be mad.

[–] [email protected] 24 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Counter: How do devs actually compress their fucking games? No reason games should approach taking up half of a hard drive.

[–] conciselyverbose 17 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Do you know how much space I could save (and transfers that could be prevented) if they offered alternate branches that didn't pack obscenely large textures onto my steam deck for no reason? You already know what textures you load on low, medium, high, ultra texture quality settings. Steam offers branches that are easy for users who care to use. Why not use them?

[–] [email protected] 3 points 5 months ago

Imagine expecting things to be simple, though. Something something Murphy's Law...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Decompression uses the cpu, so you loose performance if you compress textures.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago* (last edited 5 months ago) (1 children)

Just use delta transfer, and compress for transit and decompress on the host during install like steam does.

Technology that's been around for decades and yet for some reason so many game launchers don't make use of it.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I was referring to the hard drive, not the download. I think loading times increases if you have the textures compressed.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Yeah but if you decompress on install then you're not loading compressed textures.

[–] [email protected] 0 points 5 months ago (1 children)

But you’re still using the same amount of disk space

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

not for the transfer which is what the ISP's are crying about.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

Yes, but the first comment asked why games are so huge o the harddrive.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Sounds like we should start fining ISPs who can't/don't want to keep up.