FlightGear 1.0 hardware recommendations

Remember these hardware recommendations are based on informal user experience, be sure to consult other sources before making serious decisions regarding computer hardware.

If you are interested in running FlightGear on a notebook, you may also want to check out Notebooks known to run FlightGear. There's also a list of notebooks that are known to have issues running FlightGear: Notebooks to avoid.

Recommended hardware specs - for FlightGear 1.9.1b

• 1-2 GHZ (multi-core benefits may be employed by threaded FlightGear components such as for example the tile loader)
• at least 512-1024 MB free RAM (more is better: as of 01/2008 FlightGear will often easily eat up >= 500 MB RAM by default, thus if less free RAM is available the FlightGear process would be significantly slowed down due to OS swapping)
• 3D hardware accelerator, 128-256 MB dedicated RAM, OpenGL 1.2 capable (2.0 even better!) (You may want to check out Supported Video Cards)
• 500 MB free HD space needed for minimum installation (>=2 GB for compilations recommended,note that the full base package checkout is ~2.5GB as of 1/2008), in addition: approximately ~100-150MB per installed scenery tile (terrain: non-ocean)
• Soundblaster compatible soundcard (optional?) - preferably with EAX support
• 3 button mouse or 2 button mouse with scroll wheel
• Gameport or USB (HID compatible) joystick/yoke and/or pedals (optional) - please check out Supported Peripherals for a list of input hardware known to work with FlightGear.

Hardware Incompatibilities

A list of video cards that may not properly run FlightGear can be found at Problematic Video Cards.