Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 recently opened up to interested users for testing in its Technical Alpha phase. The game is going to be available in four different editions. One thing that is common across all of them, and in fact for Flight Simulator in general, is the hefty system requirements it demands.
The requirements are categorized as Minimum, Recommended, and Ideal, and even on the minimum recommendation, the company says a user needs 10 Mbps, while on the Recommended and Ideal scenarios, that goes up by five and ten times to 50 Mbps and 100 Mbps, respectively.
However, there are reports that the title does not stop there as internet usage during flight goes up to 300 Mbps, which means Microsoft Flight Simulator has the potential to gobble up nearly 132 GB of bandwidth per hour, and thus, users who are on capped data are going to suffer unless the cap is like really, really high, which is rather unlikely.
Or the user has to play at minimum settings even if they have a rather powerful rig that should be capable of running the game absolutely fine at increased visual settings. However, even that could be a problem as a test found that when using low-res textures and no photogrammetry effect, the game apparently sucked up 13GB of data in an hour in the process.
Thankfully, as some users have pointed out, there are ways around the issue. One of them suggests that limiting the bandwidth can help and that it does not affect the experience all that much. Keep in mind, though, that this may cause some potential texture pop-in issues while you cruise, as the assets will be streamed in and out slower.
They write:
You can set a bandwidth limit... I set mine to 40Mbit/s and it was absolutely fine. You can even do 20Mbit/s.
Another user says that using a VPN also helps. They noticed a massive improvement when switching from the US to Norway"s servers. The user says:
I"ve had luck using a VPN and connecting to a server in Norway... From the US.... Went from about 5 Mbps to about 300 Mbps. It makes no fucking sense. MSFS CDN blows.
Hence it seems like the issue could be region-specific as well which is certainly unfair to those who are having to face up to such steep bandwidth requirements. Hopefully, this is just a bug in the Alpha phase and it gets addressed in the final release.