Flight nerds love their flight sims – take it from an aircrew guy in the Air Force – and Microsoft Flight Simulator is the crème de la crème of flight sims. Microsoft’s upcoming relaunch of the series will be drop dead gorgeous if the trailers are to be believed, and today they released the official PC specifications your rig will need to reach if you want to hit that level of photo-realistic pretty.
The minimum spec isn’t as bad as you’d think. Microsoft Flight Simulator is coming to Xbox One after all, so the original console is the lowest common denominator here. But, if you want to crank this game up to the highest of settings you’ll need a beefy rig – and far more RAM than you likely imagined. No matter what spec you plan to play at, however, you will need to free up a massive 150GB of hard-drive space. Since the game will utilize Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing to help realistically render the world with genuine GPS data you’ll also need a solid internet connection.
Here’s the official spec-sheet as released by Microsoft:
That’s an impressively wide-range of hardware, and it appears even those of you with toasters for computers may be able to take up the sticks in Microsoft Flight Simulator. Though, that said, 32GB of RAM on the high end is…well, that’s certainly more than I have. Then again, flight-line devotees probably have a full replica flight deck with every virtual instrument and throttle built explicitly for this game, so I doubt 32GB of RAM is too much of an ask for them.
