Microsoft has revealed the PC system requirements for Flight Simulator, and it requires a huge 150GB of harddrive space.While install sizes have been steadily increasing over the years, this places Microsoft Flight Simulator among the very largest on PC. For comparison, this is the same size as Red Dead Redemption 2’s PC port, although still under Modern Warfare’s colossal 175GB install.It means, then, that Microsoft Flight Simulator is packing as much data as the intricately detailed world Rockstar created for Red Dead Redemption, and the huge resolution textures used for Modern Warfare’s painstaking reproduced weapons. In some respects that’s not wholly surprising considering the game features the entire planet and its 40,000 real-world airports, and depicts most parts of the world in 3D photorealism.That world is drawn from Bing map data, of which it has access to two petabytes (two million gigabytes) of, streaming via an internet connection. So even that 150GB isn’t all the data that Microsoft Flight Simulator uses to create its world, weather, and flight mechanics. In addition to hard drive space the system requirements also request a minimum of 5 mbps of bandwidth (50 mbps ideally), indicating that data streaming is a vital part of the game.As for your GPU, Microsoft asks that you ideally have the expensive Radeon VII or Nvidia RTX 2080 cards, but recommends the older Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GTX 970. If your machine is feeling its age, though, the minimum specs also support the Radeon RX 570 and Nvidia GTX 770. 8GB of RAM is the minimum requirement, but the ideal spec asks for 32GB.Microsoft Flight Simulator AirportsRecommended processors are the Ryzen 5 1500X and Intel i5-8400, but the more recent Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X and Intel i7-9800X are suggested for ideal specification. Minimum specs call for the Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel i5-4460.Microsoft has only confirmed the install size for the PC version of Flight Simulator. It remains to be seen if the Xbox version will also demand 150GB of space.For more, check out our hands-on preview of Microsoft Flight Simulator, and how it deals with the areas of the world that governments don’t want you to see.
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