The old Internet meme which was rooted in reality, “But, can it run Crysis?” believe it or not, Crysis was released in 2007 and since then, obviously other more hardware pushing titles have been released since then. Crysis funnily enough still held the title for years, it took years before hardware caught up and could run Crysis on max settings.
If you told someone back in 2007 that one day the new king of hardware pushing game would be a flight simulator, you would have been laughed at.
And yet, here we are.
The requirements for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 are:
Minimum
- CPU: Ryzen 3 1200/Intel i5-4460
- GPU: Radeon RX 570/NVIDIA GTX 770
- VRAM: 2GB
- RAM: 8GB
- HDD: 150 GB
Recommended
- CPU: Ryzen 5 1500K/Intel i5-8400
- GPU: Radeon RX 590/NVIDIA GTX 970
- VRAM: 4GB
- RAM: 16GB
- HDD: 150GB
Ideal
- CPU: Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X/Intel i7-5800X
- GPU: Radeon VII/NVIDIA RTX 2080
- VRAM: 8GB
- RAM: 32GB
- HDD: 150 GB SSD
The minimum requirements are quite reasonable, recommended reasonable and ideal not exactly too crazy. The only thing some might not meet is 32gb of RAM, but that is an easy upgrade.
The biggest problems of MSFS 2020 appear to be optimisation issues in the game itself. The game clearly has some issues in high-trafficked areas like New York and even Sydney, Australia. While MSFS 2020 is perfectly fine at 30 fps, there is something concerning about a game on high-end hardware running at such low fps comparatively to what others might deem more visually intensive titles.
In numerous benchmarks which you can find online, you’ll notice that no current-gen CPU or GPU can run MSFS 2020 at high settings and achieve a smooth 60+ fps.
It will be interesting to see if the new Nvidia 30 series cards (including the coveted Nvidia 3090) can run MSFS 2020 at its highest settings and achieve 60+fps. Although, considering the game is not optimised for DirectX12, nor does it take advantage of multi-core CPU’s, the game itself could still be the bottleneck.
Perhaps I am being a little too hard on MSFS 2020. I know it’s not completely optimised, but it’s playable. If you have a potato PC, I do not advise flying over New York, it will pin your hardware to the wall and make every fan you have spin up to maximum RPM.
The question we will now be asking ourselves is, Can it run Flight Simulator? Sadly, for as long as the game is CPU bottlenecked, we’ll keep hearing that question being asked, perhaps even on high-end cards like the 3080 and 3090.
