Flight Simulator 2024 introduction
Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 was released on November 20, 2024, and it had some serious issues at takeoff. But things have calmed down enough that we've now managed to test it on a wide selection of graphics cards and processors to see what sort of hardware the game requires for an optimal experience. We've tested 23 of the best graphics cards from the past eight years, including nearly all of the latest generation offerings. We also tested a handful of different CPUs to check how those impact performance. Due to the game's requirement for a constant internet connection for data streaming, we also took a deeper look at just how much data the game streams per hour.
We also recently had the launch of Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, another game that can be extremely demanding of your PC hardware. Give that a read if you haven't already. Microsoft's Flight Simulator 2020 already had hefty requirements for max settings, and the new 2024 release ups the ante. It also ditches DirectX 11 support and leverages DirectX 12 for all systems.
The minimum requirements list an AMD Ryzen 5 2600X or Intel Core i7-6800K processor. Basically, you want a 6-core/12-thread CPU. On the GPU front, the minimum specs list a Radeon RX 5700 or GeForce GTX 970, but those are wildly different levels of performance — according to our GPU benchmarks, the 5700 is about 2.4 times as fast as the 970. This is clearly an error and should list the RX 570 4GB, which has about the same performance as the 970. You also need 50GB of storage, and a 10 Mbps broadband internet connection is required at all times.
The recommended hardware consists of a Ryzen 7 2700X or Intel Core i7-10700K, Radeon RX 5700 XT or GeForce RTX 2080, and a 50 Mbps broadband connection. Based on that, we can show why the minimum spec GPU is supposed to be the RX 570 4GB, not the completely different RX 5700.
The 5700 XT is only about 15% faster than the vanilla RX 5700, while the RTX 2080 ends up being over three times as fast as the GTX 970. If we were looking for equivalent AMD and Nvidia picks, a better selection would be an RTX 2070 Super for the recommended GPU (about 5% ahead of the 5700 XT) and RX 570 4GB for the minimum GPU (about 6% faster than the 970). And for Intel, the Arc A380 basically matches the RX 570, while the Arc A750 comes in 3% behind the 5700 XT.
It's important to note that while Flight Simulator 2024 can be very CPU-limited on higher-spec GPUs, that's also mostly with maximum quality settings. 1080p ultra won't get much above 90 fps in our testing, but 1080p medium nearly doubles that limit — or cuts the CPU demands in half, if you prefer. And 1080p low settings can still hit reasonable framerates even on relatively slow processors.
But system requirements are only the start. There are quite a few settings you can tweak, and the initial install size for Flight Simulator 2024 ends up being much smaller than with the 2020 release... and then it streams in a bunch of map data as you play, which is where that broadband connection requirement comes into play. Let's briefly discuss our test setup and then hit the benchmarks to see how modern PC hardware fares with MSFS24.
