OCTOBER 2020 PCWorld 69being loaded, and a
whopping three to four
minutes to move past the
introduction to the main
menu. In a world where
Windows PCs are almost
immediately responsive,
it all feels excruciatingly
slow. The 15-second
audio loop the game
plays will soon drive
you insane. You may as
well go fetch a coffee
while the game’s being loaded.ALL THE DETAILS
While Flight Simulator offers everything from
tutorials to challenges (such as landing at a
particular airport), most people will want to
jump right into Flight Simulator’s virtual world.
The game pulls data from Microsoft’sstudying. While they reach back far enough to
accommodate many generations’ worth of
PCs, you do need Windows 10 version
18362.0 or higher; at least 8GB of RAM;
and discrete graphics with dedicated
memory. The minimum, recommended,
and ideal system requirements are in the
screenshot at left.
Actually playing
the game takes even
more time. My PC—a
Surface Book 3 that
falls somewhere
between Microsoft’s
“recommended”
and “ideal” system
requirements for
Flight Simulator—
required a few
seconds to show me
that the game was
You’ll see this screen quite often.
Flight Simulator is accessible to mice, keyboards, and even controllers.