Microsoft Flight Simulator specs: 150GB HDD, 'ideal spec' = RTX 2080

We knew that you'd need a beast gaming PC to run Microsoft Flight Simulator, but now we have the official PC system requirements to share.

Flight Simulator requires at least 150GB of storage space, and 8GB of RAM. You'll need an AMD Ryzen 3 1200 or Intel Core i5-4460 processor at a minimum, with 2GB of VRAM from a graphics card -- with Microsoft requiring an AMD Radeon RX 570 or NVIDIA GeForce GTX 770 graphics card.

As for recommended specs, Microsoft bumps up the CPU to a Ryzen 5 1500X or Core i5-8400 with 16GB of system RAM. You'll need a Radeon RX 590 or GeForce GTX 970 with at least 4GB of VRAM. For what Microsoft calls Flight Simulator's "ideal spec" is a huge CPU boost up to the Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X or Core i7-9800X.

You'll need 32GB of system RAM and a GPU upgrade to the Radeon VII or GeForce RTX 2080 graphics card for "ideal spec" in Flight Simulator.

But the interesting thing here with Flight Simulator requires increasing amounts of bandwidth from your internet connection as you up the graphics in the game. The minimum speeds required for Flight Simulator is 5Mbps, but recommended specs will require 20Mbps while the "ideal spec" demands a larger 50Mbps internet connection.

Why is that?

Adaptive Streaming.

Adaptive Streaming is something special that Microsoft is doing with Flight Simulator, tapping the cloud to render parts of the game and then stream it down to your PC. This is how the developers have achieved near photo-realistic levels of graphics in Flight Simulator, and it is a hat tip to the future of gaming where the cloud becomes an ever-important part of it.

You can read more about the graphics and Adaptive Streaming technology Microsoft is using on Flight Simulator here.