My aviation-oriented charity has a 2025 Dell laptop with these specs available. Will it support msfs-2024? It doesn’t have to be fantastic, just good enough to work smoothly. We will be attaching a larger display.
- Intel® Core™ Ultra 7 265HX vPro®, 20 cores
- NVIDIA® RTX™ PRO 1000 Blackwell Generation, 8 GB GDDR7
- 32 GB DDR5
- 512 GB Performance SSD, SED Ready,TLC
Back when I installed msfs-2020 on my personal system, a desktop with a good graphics card was required. I don’t know how much things have changed.
MSFS2024 seems to be better configured than 2020 and so it should run but it does look as if it doesn’t meet the requirements that MS suggest. You’d probably have to have everything dialled down to minimum settings. As for a larger display IMO you won’t get anything more than a 1068 to work.
Frankly I think you’d be disappointed, but it depends on how much you want to spend.
You might be better with 2020, I have an HP Omen laptop, with 17" screen, 32 GB RAM and an nidia 8GB card. FS20 runs perfectly well, no issues at all.
What do you need it to be able to do? Might be worth investigating a game pass sub and cloud stream it instead. If you own the xbox/ms store version, the lowest tier of game pass will let you stream.
We use it from a place with only about 300 Mb/s downward speed and less than 1 Mb/s upward speed. Also, we sometimes take it to schools or fairs, where the internet speed may not be great.
My Personal Comment & Observation
Hi @PristineInk5669
The main issue that would concern me if using would be that the graphics card only has 8GB of VRAM (memory). This is rather low if you are expecting to run the game at the higher graphical settings, and the resulting visuals might disappoint your audience.
I agree with @Terrylawdinn that you’ll probably need to set the graphical settings to the low setting, which won’t look good on a large external display at the card’s lowest resolution (1600 x 900). According to this website: "This device… is not designed to have monitors connected to it. "
You may also find that performance (FPS, “smoothness”) would not meet your expectations when flying airlines into large airports or when in photogrammetric areas.
300 mbps should be fine - you’ll not be downloading at that speed except when over some of the photogrammetric areas included in the world & city updates. At sites with less than 50 mbps, you may have performance issues such as stuttering in these areas, especially if flying aircraft with complex avionics (e.g. some airliners).
2024 allows one to download some individual components of the game to your local SSD, so this would be an option that you could do when at your high-bandwidth site so that less streaming is necessary when at you low-bandwidth sites.
If you choose to use MSFS 2020, be aware that the install size back in 2024 for the Standard edition, with all world & city updates, and no addons was 340 GB. With the release of additional world & city updates since then, I’d expect to see that size increase to 400-450 GB, which will probably cause your 512 GB Performance SSD to reach it’s capacity, though to prrevent this form occuring you could choose not to install some or all of the world & city updates (they are all optional).
I’d not suggest using 2020, but rather trying 2024 on the laptop first with a gamepass subscription as @Doehead suggests if minimizing cost is important.
Hope this helps!
Internet speed may be a bit of a concern.
The sim does require a fairly good connection.
300MB is fast! I have only just got 150 on fullfibre.
I ended up installing MSFS 2020 40th Anniversary. We ran it at the state fair very successfully.
Thats good. I still have FS20 and have no issues at all.