JET STREAM

MICROSOFT FLIGHT SIMULATOR 2024 goes higher, further, and faster

- By Len Hafer

Presenting the entire Earth in even greater fidelity than its 2020 predecessor, it’s hard to overstate what a remarkable technical accomplishment Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 represents. The aircraft and cockpits are astoundingly detailed, both visually and in how they function. The physics of flight are delightfully authentic, and while it has its quirks, no one has ever even tried to include our entire planet in a game with such fine-grain detail.

Before we get ahead of ourselves, I want to acknowledge the horrendous state of the servers at launch that prevented me and many others from even being able to play at all. These have been, at least for me, almost entirely resolved as of the writing of this, though I still do run into occasional issues like the fact that I can never seem to get all of the high-res geometry in the Grand Canyon to load. It was not an acceptable launch day experience, by any means. But I have seen no indication in my testing that you will have that bad of an experience today, so I’m willing to let the past be the past.

It is worth noting, though, that due to the streaming nature of modern Flight Simulator, you will have a variable experience depending on your network set-up. I’m lucky enough to be soaring on gigabit wired Ethernet, and allocated 200GB on a fresh SSD to FS2024’s ‘rolling cache’ that stores things like terrain data for frequently-visited locations. The load times, especially for a first-time launch, are much better than they were in FS2020, but Microsoft does recommend at least 100Mbps of bandwidth for playing on max settings. I haven’t needed that much the most I’ve seen FS2024 use at any given time is around 46Mbps. But it’s something to be aware of.

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