From Steam’s self-published stats.
Baldur’s Gate 3 could not be preloaded and weighed in at 125 gigabytes on disk, so when the game left Early Access at 11am US Eastern yesterday, Steam’s bandwidth utilization shot up 8x over a span of 30 minutes. I know personally, I saw my download hit over 600 Mbps across a 1 Gbps fiber connection.
Kudos to the system engineers at Valve. It is mind-boggling that they have built infrastructure that robust.
And that was just one copy.
That’s nothing. My coworkers node_modules directory will soon require their own NAS and dedicated 10Gbps circuits.
Imagine the number of bad peer dependences
And it still gave me 800Mbps consistently right at launch time. Good servers.
Steam has some of the most consistent and high quality servers around. It’s quite rare to see them slow down or go down, at least in my experience.
And at best only during specific sales like the Steam deck their servers became unresponsive for a bit.
I wonder how much they paid for that launch bandwith.
Steam would profit from integrating something like the bittorrent protocol for downloads imo
While true, us asymmetric broadband customers (where my upload is 1/10th my download) are grateful this is not the case:D
It could be opt-in with rewards for toggling it on.
didnt think of that
it is already partially implemented for local network transfers.
They do have such system, but only works for clients in the same lan.
Off the top of my head, I know Windows Update and the Battle.net launcher both do this
And on Windows it’s so poorly implemented they had to reserve 20% of bandwidth for updates being uploaded and downloaded and you don’t get a choice on that. So when Windows is sharing its updates your internet access suffers.
Do you have any source or article about this? I’d love to hear more about this.
Microsoft’s implementation of the feature is called Windows Update Delivery Optimization.
Here’s a short optimisation guide: https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/windows-delivery-optimization.html
Fundamentally it’s not like the Bittorrent protocol, even though there are similar behaviours and the result is the same. Microsoft retains the ability to stop the network from seeding updates and has ways of only targeting specific supported configurations to receive new updates.
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Blizzard’s Downloader used torrents.
https://www.makeuseof.com/tag/8-legal-uses-for-bittorrent-youd-be-surprised/
Didn’t know this stat was public. Cool
Anyone who has info about the environmental impact of something like this, compared to physical media? Not trying to be a downer, I’m genuinely curious.
I don’t think the difference is worth considering. The computers running for hours actually playing the game would be the same and that’s the bulk of the energy consumption. The spike from downloading it or physical distribution is probably irrelevant in the big picture.
The main argument in favor of downloading is, it’s easier to provide the necessary energy in a cleaner way. You just need electricity, and you could power everything using solar or other “clean” sources. While the production and distribution of the physical copies will have to be done by boat, car, and potentially even airplane. And I think we are still far away from electric shipping boats.
I have no info on it. I can speculate, and I’m happy to be corrected!
There is no way that physical media is greener.
Just the sheer production of physical media would be more than the servers, never mind the transportation, space in shops, people traveling to pick it up.
And then, day 1 rolls around and there would still be updates.
10x bandwidth for an hour is nothing.And I’d consider everything up to the trunk routes of the internet. Ultimate, internet trunks and consumers are going to have internet. A data center peering to the trunks isn’t hugely power intensive, the networks are going to exist and the bandwidth is available, it’s mostly a matter of cost. So, it’s essentially steams datacenter impact.
Could probably estimate it.
If it’s able to deliver 150tbps, and we assume steam is using 100gbps networking per server (ultimately, it’s just file serving), that’s 1500 servers.
Say a server is 1.5kw, that’s 1.5kw of power and 1.5kw of heat. DC cooling is about 15%, so 1.77kw per server.
Or 2.7 MW for all 1500 servers.
Round that up to 3MW to account for backups, spares, switches etc.
So, let’s assume that the BG3 download took 3MW for 1 hour.
And, I feel, this is an over estimate.Trucks are 300-500kw. Let’s take 300kw, best case.
A single DVD case (let’s ignore that this game is on the edge of a 4-layer bluray, and say it’s single disc) is 55 grams.
2.5m copies (the lowest sales estimate I’ve seen) would be 137,500 kilograms, or 137t.
A 44t artic truck can carry 24t of cargo (this depends on the actual truck and local regulations, of course).
So, moving 137t of discs requires 6 trucks.
6 X 300kw = 1.8 MW.
So, if it take more than 2 hours to truck these discs to get them to stores, then transportation is already over the DC power requirements.No more than any other release. This is just notable because it was all at once, which Steam is usually good about distributing, but this time it didn’t work out and they took the traffic all at once.
Basically you’d see the same thing spread out over days with a usual steam release and the pre-loading that goes with it.
I’m looking forward to the return of games so big they merit physical distribution. Like, the first terabyte game that comes on its own SSD - plug it into a spare M2 slot or a USB3 port and go.
You’re not going to see it unfortunately. They’ll just assume that you’re on gigabit and will spend 3 hours downloading it.
In a Datacenter that I have some equipment in, it’s $300 a month for 1gbps. At that cost, 3 hours of bandwidth costs them $1.20… this is cheaper than any current device that can hold 1TB by leaps and bounds. Forget that they’d have way bigger pipes than that and at a much better cost/gbps.
On top of that you can also program stuff to do distributed file serving (eg. bittorrent) to alleviate the datacenter costs too. So that $1.20 is a “worst case” scenario… and the costs plummet hard at each cost-cutting step they could take.
And here’s me, getting it on GOG where it’s DRM free.
This game is gonna be on one of my USB sticks for yeeeeears.
Time to buy a 256GB stick for it lol
In that spike my download speed went from 80 to 2 Mbps, I tried right after with another game, got 80 again. Baldur’s Gate really strained their network
I even had the download cancel midway through. I honestly can’t remember personally experiencing a game release that brought their servers to its knees. They should’ve really done at least a day of preload time though, that would’ve saved a lot of trouble.
Isn’t this basically the same with every bigger release?
Normally pre-loading helps to even the load. For automatic updates, Steam strategically distributes them to even the load.
There wasn’t a a pre-load for BG3 though, really. It was incompatible with their EA release.
Yes, hence the unusual spike in this case
And they had to make a bunch of posts and updates begging people to delete all saves and even completely uninstall the game. Hell, weeks ago they were flat out telling people not to even play it at all.
Which is all so silly. I really hope Valve took notice of all this, since it’s such a huge release. They could definitely do with some improvements to this whole EA -> full release. Even as simple as having an option for two downloads (old EA version you can play now OR prerelease full version you cannot play until x time on y date).
I did my part!
Mineis still downloading at about 600kb per second so it will be a while. I got pathfinder kingmaker super cheap so playing that for a bit.
Why couldn’t it be preloaded?
Is this the highest it’s ever been? Pretty nuts.
Using torrents would be relevant
So that’s why my download took 15 hours.
