Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 on a 13 year old PC

Have hopes of taking to the skies in MSFS 2020 but your PC is now a teenager? Have no fear, MSFS 2020 DOES run on some pretty old hardware.

I tested MSFS 2020 on my XEON W-2145 rig with a GTX 670 4gb recently. It worked too well so i thought I'd try the game on my older spare rig with an even worse GPU.

You can buy used Quadro K/M GPUs for a very small price these days. I bought a used Quadro K4000 for $20 on ebay. (the better K4200 was $5 more for reference though).

The specs:

i7 3770

32gb ddr3

300gb HDD (and boot 240gb SSD that's equally slow)

Quadro K4000 3GB

I tried running the game at lowest 640p. I was getting between 35 and 45 FPS with 1% lows around 15. Honestly I'm surprised the game even boots.

Bottom line: My CPU was not at 100% most of the time. So I beleive an i5 would also work. You only need 12gb-16gb RAM too. Usage stayed around 10gb total. The HDD was also fine, although slow and loud. It didn't seem to affect gameplay that much.

Given this, I bet MSFS 2020 would also run on nicer IGPUs like iris XE and Radeon 660m. If not, MSFS X is very cheap and runs on basically any recent PC.

Anyway, hope this helps someone out there. Next I'll be trying some other games with the K4000 in my main rig. (Still using the GTX 670 now...)