Despite Flight Simulator 2024’s surprisingly low system requirements, the “ideal spec” requires more RAM than storage

If you can’t wait to finally get into the cockpit of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, the official X account has posted a handy system requirements chart to run the game, which seems surprisingly well-optimized. If you wanted to, you could technically run the game on hardware you bought almost a decade ago, which could mean your senior graphics card and CPU could be worth less than the $200 Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 Aviator Edition bundle.

For the minimum requirements, a build with an Intel Core i7-6800K and GeForce GTX 960 can run the game, as long as you have 16GB of RAM. The recommended requirements swap that 16GB of RAM for 32GB, and suggest getting an RTX 2080 or Radeon RX 5700XT as your GPU. Once again, these aren’t incredibly intense specs considering how impressive Flight Simulator 2024 looks. The revamped 2024 version, which is due out on November 19, includes novel mission types, novel planes to apply, pilots with real legs, and even has an improved physics engine that’s supposed to give future pilots a greater degree of control.

Of course, the most recommended specs are still pretty monstrous, requiring relatively solid hardware to get going. Interestingly, Microsoft’s advertised “Ideal Specs” actually require more RAM than storage — it’s the first current game I can think of that does that — and those numbers are 64GB of RAM and 50GB of storage, respectively.

Compare that to the previous version of Flight Simulator, and you’ll see that’s a pretty hefty reduction in the storage requirements of a novel game, which you can clearly thank the cloud for. With all the updates in the world, the current version of Flight Sim could have an install size that’s ten times larger than the promised novel edition of Flight Sim 2024. And if you want to go wild with mods, you could theoretically hit a ridiculous 2TB as an install size. So 50GB for a novel game seems almost too good to be true.

If you want to buy the game, you can buy the Standard Edition for $70, the Deluxe Edition for $100, the Premium Deluxe Edition for $130 and Air Edition for $200. Unlike what you might expect from the last few decades of flashy collector’s editions, the $200 edition is digital-only and doesn’t include a plastic model plane or commemorative pins. With this edition, you get everything from the Premium Deluxe Edition, which includes 25 planes and 10 airports, as well as 30 planes from the last three years of Microsoft Flight Simulator.

It’s not the most exorbitant digital edition of a game we’ve seen, not counting the $2,000 one-offs, with the much-lamented $250 Escape from Tarkov: Unheard Edition coming in at $250 earlier this year, but it’s still a lot of money for a game, and a lot more than the GTX 970 GPU that could technically run the game.