As gaming continues to take leaps forward, the truly transformational, boundary-pushing next-gen game development will be powered by the cloud. Microsoft Flight Simulator is but one example of a title stepping boldly into the potential unlocked when compute, networking, and storage are no longer locked to the device gamers are playing on. In this deep dive, we share a glimpse into the tech stack Asobo Studios used to build Microsoft Flight Simulator. Leaning heavily upon Microsoft technologies,

Figure 1: The Microsoft Flight Simulator high-level architecture creates a digital twin of the real world. Azure brings exponentially more computing power and storage to Microsoft Flight Simulator. Petabytes of Bing data and images are preprocessed and stored—along with photogrammetry data, vector-based maps, and trillions of accurate tree and other environmental masks—entirely on Azure. Given the earth-sized scale of the need to accurately render the digital twin, or high-resolution digital v