Next month, we will embark on a world tour with the massive flight simulation game Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. This game will be even bigger than the previous installment, allowing us to exit the plane and explore the map on foot.
But can you imagine that playing this game could cost you 80GB of internet consumption per hour! Yes, according to a report from Tom’s Hardware, playing Microsoft Flight Simulator 2025 can consume 80GB of internet per hour to stream data and compensate for the large game size locally.
The report stated:
The early technical trial version of Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 revealed that the data streaming requirements for the game can reach up to 180 megabytes per second during flight – a number that puts peak usage at around 81 gigabytes per hour of gameplay in high LOD settings while flying over densely populated areas.
At the same time, scattered reports on the bandwidth consumption of MS Flight Sim 2020 indicate that the bandwidth consumption of MS Flight Sim 2020 implies a more conservative rate of approximately 100 megabytes per second in highly urbanized areas, such as major cities. Usage can drop in less populated areas to 10 megabytes per second, although Microsoft’s official bandwidth recommendation for the game was 50 megabytes per second.
We learned that the actual data size of Flight Simulator 2024 is 2.5 terabytes. However, it will avoid the large download size, with the download size being 50 gigabytes when the game is released in November 2024. The game developer talked about the issue faced by the 2020 release and promised that it will not be present in 2024, but how?
Players who tried the first installment and got all its updates know well that the 2020 release had reached 500 gigabytes in size for all data. This time, the game avoids excessive local file sizes, but this comes at the cost of relying more on the cloud. Most of the data will be uploaded to it and heavily utilized during gameplay to retrieve world details and updates.
