We’re now just a few scant days away from the Microsoft Flight Simulator release date. The game comes out on Xbox Game Pass for PC, the Microsoft Store, and Steam next week, and now we know how much hard drive space you’re going to need to clear to ensure a smooth landing.
According to the Flight Simulator page in the Microsoft Store, you’ll need 127GB of free space in order to install the new simulation game, which spans the entire globe thanks to its integration of Bing map data. If you think of it in terms of square miles per gigabyte, it’s really a bargain in terms of storage efficiency.
Of course, that’s because you won’t really be installing the entire planet onto your exclusive gaming SSD – that 127GB is likely devoted to the assets you’ll want on hand all the time, but a lot of what goes on in the game will be streaming to your machine from Microsoft’s servers.
All the same, it’s still less than the 150GB we were expecting when the Microsoft Flight Simulator system requirements were revealed in April. There was good news there, too – for all the impressive weather systems and gorgeous cockpit interiors the game features, the recommended graphics card is just a Radeon RX 590 or Nvidia GTX 970. For the full experience, however, you’ll want something more along the lines of a Radeon VII or RTX 2080.
If you’ve got one of those bleeding-edge cards in your case, you’ll be able to fly through the mountains of Nepal in glorious 4K, as seen in this new batch of footage showing off Flight Simulator’s planes and airports:
If you’re a Game Pass subscriber, you’ll be able to download and play the game at no additional charge when it launches, but you can also join the throng that’s opted to buy the game on Steam – where it became a top-seller the day pre-orders went live.
Now that you have your hard drive cleared out, all that’s left to do is to get in touch with your uncle to find out if you can ‘borrow’ his old HOTAS. You can read our Microsoft Flight Simulator review here. Be sure to head over to our partner site PCGameBenchmark to compare your computer spec and answer the question, “can I run Flight Sim 2020?“.