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. 

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. 

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.  

The PC Gaming Show will return this year with another blockbuster broadcast on Twitch, YouTube, X and Steam on June 8, 2025.

The first of two shows planned for 2025—with Most Wanted also set to return later this year—June’s showcase will spotlight over 50 games on PC, Steam Deck, Linux and MacOS while celebrating all things PC gaming.

Within, viewers can expect a wealth of world premieres, exclusive announcements, in-depth developer interviews and much more as we shine a light on the best and most interesting games and hardware our platform of choice has to offer today.

It seems impossible the PC Gaming Show made its first-ever appearance way back at E3 2015, but the longevity of the showcase is testament to the enduring mainstream growth of PC gaming and the millions of viewers who underpin it all.

We’re working hard behind the scenes to bring all of this together for you right now, but we’ll be teasing more about the games that’ll take centre stage in due course on PCGamer.com. An exact broadcast time will also be shared nearer our June 8 live date itself.

If you're a game developer who's working on an unannounced game, we'd love to hear from you. Email ✉ jake.tucker@futurenet.com and melissa.makhmaltchi@futurenet.com.

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