Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 provides players with a virtual reality recreation of Earth that offers a sense of unmatched realism. Despite initial launch setbacks, the game promises thrilling aviation adventures and limitless exploration.
Beyond the game's familiar focus on aerial navigation, the 2024 release of Flight Simulator allows players to land and explore on foot, enhancing the game's depth. There are still severe mapping imperfections at street level, but the ongoing improvements to this 3D mapping tech conjure up dreams of a future iteration of Flight Simulator where one day we hopefully get to exit our aircraft and walk among much higher detailed streets in any city across the globe. It's going to be a while before we see that level of realism, though, so don’t hold your breath on this type of detail appearing any time soon in games like this one.
With DLSS aiding performance for those players equipped with an RTX series NVIDIA GPU, maintaining the game's level of detail still requires significant computing power. The heft of this game sometimes stresses even high-end systems when flying in densely populated areas, so to experience the game at the highest visual fidelity and frame rates, a powerful PC is essential.
Running the game on a rig with the specs listed above, I still faced performance challenges in busy airspace when the game's VR graphics settings were dialed up to ultra. The sheer complexity and demands of this simulation reveal the need for some serious hardware, so if you don’t have a powerful PC, I wouldn’t recommend going above the low setting. Even though it might make the image quality suffer further, you might want to consider turning off any antialiasing options in the game. Performance will likely improve with updates, as it did with the 2020 version of the game, but until then, those without a top-end gaming rig will need to dial things back a bit.
Ultimately, Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 is more than just a game, it's an invitation for new generations of virtual pilots to chase their childhood dreams across an ever-expanding virtual world.