Home Microsoft Flight Simulator PC Specifications released – will you be able to run it?

Microsoft Flight Simulator PC Specifications released – will you be able to run it?

With less than two months to go into the release of Microsoft’s new showpiece Flight Simulator 2024, the flight sim looks like upping the benchmarks for anything we have seen go before it.

The flight sim team has posted on its X account exactly the kind of hardware we are going to need to be packing in order to get the game looking like all the amazing videos and screenshots we have seen. If you want to run it in VR in something like a Pimax Crystal Light as Microsoft did at a recent showcase event, you are going to be drifting towards the higher end of these specs we would imagine.

Microsoft Flight Simulator PC Specifications

A highly detailed set of specifications awaits with in-depth breakdowns for both Intel and AMD setups. The minimum spec should be well within everybody’s reach but the scary-looking ‘ideal spec’ is suggesting a GTX 4080 or equivalent to get the game looking anything like its best. That’s at least a $1000 graphics card on top of potentially a $200 version of the game. You could just about fly to the other side of the world for real for that, but of course, it wouldn’t be as much fun cramped up in Economy.

Let’s take a look at those specs.

Category Min Spec (AMD) Min Spec (NVIDIA/Intel) Recommended Spec (AMD) Recommended Spec (NVIDIA/Intel) Ideal Spec (AMD) Ideal Spec (NVIDIA/Intel)
OS Version Windows 10 Windows 10 Windows 10 Windows 10 Windows 10 Windows 10
Direct X Version DX12 DX12 DX12 DX12 DX12 DX12
CPU AMD Ryzen 5 2600X Intel Core i7-6800K AMD Ryzen 7 2700X Intel Core i7-10700K AMD Ryzen 9 7900X Intel Core i7-14700K
GPU Radeon RX 5700 GeForce GTX 970 Radeon RX 5700 XT GeForce RTX 2080 Radeon RX 7900 XT GeForce RTX 4080
VRAM 8 GB 4 GB 6 GB 8 GB 12 GB 12 GB
RAM 16 GB 16 GB 32 GB 32 GB 64 GB 64 GB
Storage 50 GB 50 GB 50 GB 50 GB 50 GB 50 GB
Bandwidth 10 Mbps 10 Mbps 50 Mbps 50 Mbps 100 Mbps 100 Mbps

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Paul McNally
Gaming Editor

Paul McNally has been around consoles and computers since his parents bought him a Mattel Intellivision in 1980. He has been a prominent games journalist since the 1990s, spending over a decade as editor of popular print-based video games and computer magazines, including a market-leading PlayStation title published by IDG Media. Having spent time as Head of Communications at a professional sports club and working for high-profile charities such as the National Literacy Trust, he returned as Managing Editor in charge of large US-based technology websites in 2020. Paul has written high-end gaming content for GamePro, Official Australian PlayStation Magazine,…

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