While those are very modest specs indeed, it’s fair to say they won’t give you the kind of realistic graphics and satellite-image-quality environments that Microsoft has showed off so far. To get the best results, you’ll probably want something close to Microsoft’s “Ideal Spec.” That requires much more recent Ryzen 7 Pro 2700X or Intel i7-9800X CPUs, along with high-end AMD Radeon VII and NVIDIA RTX 2080 GPUs with 8GB of VRAM at least. You’ll also need no less than 32GB of RAM, a 150GB SSD and a 50 Mbps connection, at least.

I’m on the alpha program and have played Flight Sim 2020 on both a laptop with a GTX 1070 GPU and desktop PC with an RTX 2080 Ti GPU. Suffice to say, there’s a pretty big difference in performance and graphics quality between the two machines, and the laptop is no slouch. If enjoying the incredibly detailed environment is more important than practicing your flying skills, I think it’s fair to say that you’ll have a better experience with a high-end PC and fast internet connection — just as you’d expect. .