The has hit the headlines in a bad way with a report flagging up that it can chomp your bandwidth when streaming the in-game world to the tune of up to 180Mbps. observes that this works out at something like 81GB of data per hour of gameplay when flying over densely populated areas with high detail settings, and that’s a figure that has understandably put some frowns on the faces of PC gamers. The data is drawn from a video uploaded by Compusemble (see below) which comprises four test flights taken in the technical alpha of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, measuring both performance and internet bandwidth.

And here’s where we need to take a flight over (the densely populated) Caveat City. The first and most glaring point is that Tom’s notes that data can ‘reach as high as’ a streaming rate of 180Mbps, but of course that’s a worst-case scenario, and it doesn’t get up anywhere near there most of the time. Indeed, in the video, we can see that when flying over New York, the bandwidth is more like 30 to 50Mbps in the main, with spikes over 100Mbps (up to 180Mbps) which are very much the exception, not the rule.

It’s more like 10 to 30Mbps when the level of detail is turned down a bit more, the vast majority of the time. Similarly, in the Grand Canyon gameplay, we’re looking at 60 to 90Mbps (or 40 to 70Mbps with the details lowered somewhat). We should also point out that this is in resolution, Ultra details, which not everyone will be running at either – these.