Half-Life 2 to Begin Pre-Loading This Month?

[Jonbo298]

Steam is a program used by Valve. It serves as the main hub for all its games Like Half life, Day of Defeat, Counterstrike, etc...and used to authenticate you have a legit copy of a game if you want to play multiplayer, etc...

[Jonbo298]

More Interesting and cool info. about the pre-load that gabe posted on HL2 Fallout Forums

Right now we have about 60 Steam content servers running around the world. They are throttled to 100 Mbps, but can handle ~800 Mbps if necessary.

In terms of network bandwidth, we're currently running at 4 Gbps, and will boost to 7 Gbps when we start pre-loading. We have the option of increasing that to 14 Gbps with a phone call (admittedly a really expensive phone call).

Since Half-Life 2 is ~2 GB (or 16 Gb) over the wire, we can serve up about a person/second with a complete copy of the game. These are idealized numbers - the real capacity planning numbers are quite a bit lower.

So pre-loading is a good thing, being able to play before you have a complete copy of the game is a good thing, and having buckets and buckets of bandwidth is a good thing. It's interesting that videogames in addition to being a larger aggregate audience than almost any TV show (and a lot of countries total Internet traffic) are also now becoming one of the largest consumers of bandwidth on the net.

I'm curious if people know of other single applications consuming more than 10 Gbps.

http://www.hl2fallout.com/forums/ind...wtopic=2594&hl

All I can say is holy sh*t!

[Ace195]

I can't wait this is going to be awsome

[Jason1]

That sounds like a lot of bandwidth.