Netflix themselves say that 15Mbps is enough for 4k.
1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around.
Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream.
Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.
It's about video streaming. The challenge with Factorio is that there is always lots of very tiny little changes on the screen from all the tiny boxes and trays of stuff moving around on belts, which means if you want acceptable video quality, you need a lot of bitrate as the usual h264/h265 compression magic of just encoding differences between frames doesn't work out any more - too much change between frames, you're (effectively) forcing the codec to transmit full frames all the time.
Strange that when one talks about a particular application using a lot of upstream bandwidth, we are meant to assume what they actually mean is that a separate application responsible for recording the UI of that first application and uploading it to a server uses a lot of upstream bandwidth.
Perhaps I wasn't clear. It isn't phoning home to Mother like a Windows box might. :) Factorio runs, by default, completely locally.
I was using Factorio, as a single player, with the thing split into two parts: A server component, and a client component.
The data betwixt my headless server and my client was just getting too heavy at times for the 20Mbps upstream of that server.
Why so much data? Thousands of bots, constant wars, lots of things being moved around, interplanetary mining happening on a decent scale... The data transferred gets bigger as the game becomes more complex.
"But, like -- why didn't you just play it remotely like everyone else does using Steam's remote play or something?"
The latency of Remote Play sucks in ways that are distracting to me. The h.264 video sucks and has artifacts, presumably because of tradeoffs made to improve latency. My 10Mbps upstream at home works OK with Plex and hardware encoding where latency isn't important, but it doesn't work well at all for me with Factorio.
Splitting Factorio into two parts (client and server) eliminates video encoding, but it isn't completely without cost.
"But you said you had a server with a 20Mbps connection. What happened to that?"
I do. But it's under my desk at work (as is tradition), not at home. And that box doesn't have enough GPU oomph to deal with rendering Factorio.
"Right. OK, weirdo. So why aren't you just playing Factorio at home on your presumed gaming PC, then?"
Sometimes, I'm not at home or I just don't want to sit at my desk. My laptop has enough GPU to run Factorio smoothly as a client, but it does not have enough CPU to keep a moderately-complex game running smoothly on its own. And that's where splitting the game into two parts becomes worthwhile for me.
(Or, you know: Maybe I just want to play it online with a friend, like a normal person might -- but someone still has to run the server, somewhere. Some options include running that server on available hardware with available connections [for "free"], or renting hardware from Hetzner or something [not even a little bit free].
The point is: I've found that it sucks running a Factorio server with a 20Mbps upstream, even with just a single player, and thus a top-flight residential Comcast connection won't keep up. If I had 5 friends who wanted to play instead of 0 friends, that problem would be even more pronounced.
I mean. It's 2024, my dudes. What's up with this 60:1 down:up ratio?)
Well... I mean, it's Factorio. Everything including the base game is a mod. :)
Silliness aside, it's a built-in part of "Multiplayer," which is included with the base game. But my late-night brain refused to use the word "Multiplayer" in an instance where only a single player (me) has ever been involved.
Like Quake was back in the day, online/multiplayer play of Factorio requires servers, and those servers are all run by regular-ish people. Some servers are public and are easy to find (and as with Quake, sometimes this is unintentional), and some [like my own] are private, unlisted, and don't even exist on the public Internet.
1.2Gbps downstream is enough for >50 such 4k video streams without saturation -- something that will probably never happen in any household, even in Grandma's house on Christmas Eve with a bunch of grandkids around.
Meanwhile, I've had single-player games of Factorio of medium complexity that would saturate 20Mbps upstream.
Nobody needs a connection that is so heavily lopsided as 1.2Gbps/20Mbps is except for the marketing department, and the DOCSIS sunk-cost-fallacy department.