On July 12, 2020, Microsoft opened up preorders and announced that Microsoft Flight Simulator for PC will be available on August 18, 2020. The company announced three different versions of the title – standard, deluxe, and premium deluxe, each providing an incremental set of gameplay features, including airports, and airplanes to choose from.

Jul 30, 2020 Open the Steam application and download the launcher update for the some. More in-depth guide here flightsimulator.zendesk.com. Launch Microsoft Flight Simulator and install the in-game content update. Once in the sim, head to the Marketplace and download the free content update for The Nordics. Take to the skies and experience the joy of flight in the next generation of Microsoft Flight Simulator. The world is at your fingertips. Play over 100 high-quality games with friends, plus enjoy Xbox Live Gold and an EA Play membership, all for one low monthly price. From light planes to wide-body.

Hello, forum.

Sorry to bother you, but I seem to have joined the ranks of people who can’t get FS2020 to start up.

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Steam Edition

I’ve been running it more or less since the Steam release, but on a pretty sub-spec PC. It worked, but not terribly well - though I went into that eyes open. After a CPU/RAM upgrade things improved quite a bit. Today I installed a new GPU which I’d hoped would at least make it possible for me to switch the sky back on (volumetric effects were murdering my previous 2Gb GPU so I generally flew with them off).

Unfortunately, I’m now unable to start FS at all. I’ve tried loading from Steam, via desktop icon, and through the Radeon management app. In every case, I get a cursor “wait” swirly for a few seconds, then just nothing. In Steam, I get a window saying “Preparing to launch”, which then disappears, the green Play button becomes the blue Stop button for about a minute, and then it just clicks back to Play again. In Task Manager, the flightsimulator.exe process starts up under Steam, goes to around 11% CPU usage and a solid 343.5 Mb RAM, stays there for about 30-60 seconds or so, then shuts off.

I’ve tried various ‘fixes’ I’ve found on forums including checking installation integrity via Steam, reinstalling the XBox PC app to make sure Gaming Services is up to date, and finally uninstalling FS and redownloading from Steam. (I can’t do a full reinstall because the game doesn’t get far enough to trigger one.) The only suggestion I’ve found that I haven’t tried is switching back to the old card - but to be honest I’d rather avoid that if possible. The whole point was to make FS work somewhere approaching properly. But since the card works fine for everything else, I think if I’m forced to choose, I’ll keep the card and ditch FS.

But I’d rather not have to choose. So, forum - does anyone have any other suggestions? Anything else I might try?

(PS - For info, the old card was a GeForce GTX 960. The new one is a Radeon RX 580 with 8Gb which I’d hoped would be an improvement. The CPU is a Ryzen 5 and the PC has 16Gb RAM - but again, only the GPU has changed since it last ran okay.)

Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020 Steam

1. Fixed ground level of detail (low resolution) when flying at airliner altitude.
2. Fixed 'washed out / oil painted' clouds and the overall luminosity under cloud coverage.
3. Fixed missing volumetric lights.
4. Fixed abnormal temperature spikes over airports when the Metar data was not updating often enough.
5. Aligned pressure altitude simvar and pitot static altitude calculations to prevent wrong altitude information for external Live ATC services.
6. GPU stats are now displayed in the debug window when the dev mode is activated on PC.
7. Disabled aggressive compilation optimization for WASM (signed-zeroes, NoInf and NoNaN but keep fast-math).