As impressive as the simulated world is, Google 3D maps often provides more detailed images of what's on the ground.

More specifically, the world map that you see in Microsoft Flight Simulator while flying a plane over a specific region is powered by Bing Maps.

There are 341 fully modeled cities in Microsoft Flight Simulator, and that's a significant achievement -- a genuine leap forward compared with anything any simulator has tried to do before.

Developers have published the August 20 developer update for Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is the first since the game launched on the 18th.

The company was able to push 2.5 petabytes worth of Bing Maps satellite photo data through Azure machine learning to construct the virtual world of Flight Simulator.