3 ms·

Also, updates are not inconsequential. I've had it happen multiple times where my PS4 has between 2 and 5 update files that are each 5-15GB (sometimes as large

Also, updates are not inconsequential. I've had it happen multiple times where my PS4 has between 2 and 5 update files that are each 5-15GB (sometimes as large as 20-30GB, but that's a rarity) queued up in the same day, and that can happen multiple times a month. Combine that with some 4K streaming, and the 1TB data cap Comcast has in my area looks tiny.

paulmd 7y ago
Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full. I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that. I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.
- cameronbrown 7y ago
  Thankfully Steam can soak up a reasonable amount of your internet's pipes and does use delta files.
- shadowoflight 7y ago
  I hate that companies have no concept of storage optimization anymore - sure, higher-res textures take up more space, but there’s literally no excuse for Battlefield 1 taking up 70GB of my PS4 storage. Plus the PS4 does weird stuff with updates, so I need to leave ~100GB of my 2TB drive free at any time so that it can figure out what to do with those massive update files before deleting the unneeded files... I have found that forcing the PS4 to use CloudFlare’s DNS speeds up downloads by an order of magnitude, though, which is nice - updates that used to take an hour or more now downloads in <10 minutes.
papln 7y ago
1TB is 3hrs/day of the highest-bandwidth 4K streaming Netflix at 25Mbps. The other streamers ask for even lower bitrate.
- shadowoflight 7y ago
  Let’s be generous and say 1hr of 4K streaming is 10GB, so you can stream 100hrs of 4K content in a month with a 1TB cap - that’s reasonable, assuming everyone in the household watches the same show at the same time. But what if I want to watch Blade Runner 2049 while my wife watches Queer Eye, both in 4K? We’re suddenly looking at 50-60GB of our cap gone in one evening. And then what if a few games downloaded updates earlier on that day? Now we’re hovering around 100GB in a single day. Sure, that’s an extreme example, and that’s not going to be every single day (Sony only pushes game updates on Tuesdays, for instance), but you can see how easy it would be for a two-person household to eat through 10% of our monthly bandwidth in a single day - and we don’t even have kids with their own devices consuming their own media!

paulmd 7y ago

Companies have stopped distributing patches as "delta files", where you only download the data that's changed. Now they just check checksums on the file and any file that doesn't match is re-downloaded in full. I regularly saw patches of 5-15 GB on Battlefield V despite the updates including no additional content of note. Just small tweaks that triggered full redownloads of asset files. It also makes update performance absolutely fucking abysmal - I would regularly see the game take 30-45 minutes just to decide what files it needed to download, despite the entire game being loaded onto a 280GB Optane SSD, one of the highest IOPS SSDs yet manufactured. And then wait another 2 hours while it downloaded off their server at under 500 kb/s... on a connection that could easily do 20x that. I never thought I'd say it, but I actually miss the days of Bittorrent based downloaders where it would checksum blocks rather than files and then you'd download them at high speed from peers.

cameronbrown 7y ago
Thankfully Steam can soak up a reasonable amount of your internet's pipes and does use delta files.
shadowoflight 7y ago
I hate that companies have no concept of storage optimization anymore - sure, higher-res textures take up more space, but there’s literally no excuse for Battlefield 1 taking up 70GB of my PS4 storage. Plus the PS4 does weird stuff with updates, so I need to leave ~100GB of my 2TB drive free at any time so that it can figure out what to do with those massive update files before deleting the unneeded files... I have found that forcing the PS4 to use CloudFlare’s DNS speeds up downloads by an order of magnitude, though, which is nice - updates that used to take an hour or more now downloads in <10 minutes.

papln 7y ago

1TB is 3hrs/day of the highest-bandwidth 4K streaming Netflix at 25Mbps. The other streamers ask for even lower bitrate.

shadowoflight 7y ago
Let’s be generous and say 1hr of 4K streaming is 10GB, so you can stream 100hrs of 4K content in a month with a 1TB cap - that’s reasonable, assuming everyone in the household watches the same show at the same time. But what if I want to watch Blade Runner 2049 while my wife watches Queer Eye, both in 4K? We’re suddenly looking at 50-60GB of our cap gone in one evening. And then what if a few games downloaded updates earlier on that day? Now we’re hovering around 100GB in a single day. Sure, that’s an extreme example, and that’s not going to be every single day (Sony only pushes game updates on Tuesdays, for instance), but you can see how easy it would be for a two-person household to eat through 10% of our monthly bandwidth in a single day - and we don’t even have kids with their own devices consuming their own media!