Microsoft Flight Simulator is one of the most demanding video games ever made. It pushes today's highest-end PCs to their limits. So how did Microsoft get it running on Xbox Series X/S hardware? It borrowed power from the cloud.
Microsoft Flight Simulator on consoles both rides the clouds and is powered by them. Today the company confirmed that Flight Simulator's console release is driven in part by Microsoft's potent Azure servers, which can stream the massive 2.5 petabytes of Flight Sim data from the servers directly to console hardware. Machine learning is also a big part of what makes Flight Simulator tick and is responsible for building the game's staggeringly-detailed environments in real-time.
"The Series X is a super-powerful console and we're also using the Microsoft tech stack in an interesting way. The Series X/S are like beasts, the GPU is awesome, the CPU is multiple cores, fast RAM so we can run in 4K, the SSD is super-fast. It's basically the equivalent of a high-end PC," said Flight Sim boss Jorg Neumann.
"We're also using the Microsoft game stack. We have 2.5 petabytes of data sitting on Azure, and we're basically streaming that as you go and we also do machine learning algorithms and that's how we build, procedurally in run time, 1.5 billion houses and two trillion trees. It's a combination of those two things: Super-powerful console, the advances in tech stack. That's how you get it to work on console."
Microsoft's game stack technology has a ton of powerful and flexible tools for developers to utilize, including DirectX 12 Ultimate APIs, Azure optimizations, and more.
Microsoft Flight Simulator releases on Xbox Series X/S consoles on July 27, 2021.
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