Despite some surprisingly chill Flight Simulator 2024 system requirements, the 'Ideal Spec' demands more RAM than storage

A blimp, flying next to the mountains in Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024

(Image credit: Microsoft)

If you're looking forward to finally stepping into the cockpit of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the official X account has put out a handy chart for the system requirements to run it, and it seems surprisingly well optomized. If you wanted to, you could technically run the game on a rig bought almost a decade ago, which could mean your old graphics card and CPU might be worth less than the $200 Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Aviator Edition bundle.

Are you planning to fly on PC? Here are the minimum, recommended, and ideal system requirements for #MicrosoftFlightSimulator2024. 🖥️ 🔗 https://t.co/pBmUKmFXgP pic.twitter.com/yDdsDaxutRSeptember 19, 2024

For its minimum requirements, a build with an Intel Core i7-6800K and GeForce GTX 960 could run the game, so long as you have 16 GB of RAM. Recommended requirements swap that 16 GB of RAM for 32 GB and suggest grabbing either an RTX 2080 or Radeon RX 5700XT as your GPU. Once again, these aren't incredibly intensive specs given how impressive Flight Simulator 2024 is looking. The 2024 refresh, launching November 19, comes with new mission types, new aircraft to use, pilots with actual legs, and even has an improved physics engine intended to give greater degrees of control to prospective pilots.

The top recommended specs are, of course, still pretty monstrous, requiring a relatively beefy rig to get going. Interestingly, Microsoft's touted "Ideal spec" actually requires more RAM than it does storage—the first modern game I can think of to do that—with those figures being 64 GB of RAM and 50 GB of storage space respectively.

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Compare that to the previous version of Flight Simulator, and you'll see that's a pretty healthy reduction in the new game's storage demands, and you can apparently thank the cloud for that. With all its world updates, the current version of Flight Sim can be up to ten times the promised install size of this new Flight Sim 2024 edition. And if you wanted to go hog wild with the mods you could theoretically hit a ludicrous 2 TB as the install size. So, 50 GB for the new game seems almost too good to be true.

If you are looking to buy the game, you can get the Standard Edition for $70, Deluxe Edition for $100, Premium Deluxe Edition for $130, and the Aviator Edition for $200. Unlike what you might expect from the past few decades of garish collector's editions, the $200 edition is digital only, and doesn't come with a plastic plane model or commemorative pins. In this edition, you get everything from the Premium Deluxe Edition, which includes 25 aircraft and 10 airports, as well as 30 aircraft spanning over the last three years of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

This isn't quite the most expensive digital edition of a game we've seen, not including one-off $2,000 games, with the much-bemoaned $250 Escape from Tarkov: Unheard Editon costing $250 earlier this year. However, it is quite a lot of money to throw down on a game, and a good bit more than the GTX 970 GPU you can technically run the game on.

James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.