After Microsoft Flight Simulator (and Aces Game Studio) was axed back in January 2009 as part of a cost cutting move, we’ve been getting occasional and fairly cryptic messages from something new from Games for Windows Live called “Microsoft Flight”, which was first announced last August.  Today, they’re at it again, posting that while they’re “not quite ready” to talk release date yet (but check back in December for an “exciting announcement”!), they are sharing a bit of information.  From the blog post:

Amongst the most popular questions the Flight team has been asked via e-mails to msflight@microsoft.com are those about the release date and game performance. While we aren’t quite ready to talk about a release date, we did want to share a bit about our approach towards performance and hardware.

Performance optimization has been a core focus of our development from an early stage. To achieve this, we constantly monitored game performance metrics across a range of hardware configurations and reacted each time we saw a new feature or code change that caused a dip below the established thresholds. The end result is that Flight looks fantastic on a brand new PC, but because of the emphasis on performance throughout development, it also runs well on older desktops and budget laptops.

The graphic below illustrates the visual difference between the low and high settings.

You can check out the system requirements (and even apply for a job!) on the blog.  There are even some new screenshots for November!