High Fidelity Breaks Another Local Concurrency Record With 250+ Users -- Though VRChat Remains the Social VR Concurrency Champion

Last month's peak concurrency test in High Fidelity got 209 users in the same contiguous space. Last week's test passed 250 (256, to be exact)-- in practical terms, about the size of a large nightclub or a small theater, so a pretty ideal concurrency for, say, an intimate music performance, play, or fireside chat.

"Was amazing, the feeling of being in a thick crowd in VR," HiFI user "Judas" tells me. And he says lag overall was minimal:

"I could move about OK. I think the people who struggled were still downloading avatars. Over 200 avatars mostly unique takes a bit of downloading. I think because I went to the last [concurrency test] I had a lot of that stuff cached already." He personally reports getting 60 frames per second from the PC version of High Fidelity, which is pretty ideal for PCs, though not optimal for VR.  Then again, it might not be an ideal time of the year for VR:

"I was in desktop the first half then put on my Rift for the second [half]." But soon got sweltering with the headset on: "Was a hot day here, gives me hot eyes."

 

More from the High Fidelity blog:

 

High-performance server cluster, but still affordable: For this load test we ran five servers on Amazon 72-core xLarge instances. Peak outbound bandwidth was 1.5 Gigabits per second and we delivered more than 675 Gigabytes of data. Although these are big machines, using them for the half-hour duration of the event cost less than $10, making the bandwidth used the most expensive part at about $100. But that’s very affordable —you can throw a VR event for 250 people at a total hosting cost of around $110. That’s a tiny fraction of what it would cost to rent out an event space.

Notably, while High Fidelity is the reigning local concurrency champion, VRChat remains the peak concurrency king, with daily maximums well over 7000. Beyond stress tests like this, High Fidelity's peak concurrency (as with the other social VR platforms) is in the two to three figures. So far, the ability to host a huge crowd isn't in itself a growth driver.

 

Comments

[Willliam Burns]

Dual Universe decimates both concurrency records.

250 in a single spot isn't impressive. Dual Universe managed over 1,000 in a single spot and that was a few years ago with the added caveat that the system continues to scale cost effectively for much higher numbers due to their underlying architecture.

Keep in mind that Dual Universe is also dealing with entire planets and galaxies.

7,000 is sort of impressive but I'd be willing to bet they're brute forcing it, which means that impressive number may be the limit for them.

But High Fidelity? They're bragging about 250 concurrency like it's impressive. Only if you're comparing it to Second Life.

[Hamlet Au]

"Dual Universe managed over 1,000 in a single spot and that was a few years ago"

Link for a report on this? Not seeing anything on the Google...