It has been a busy week for the Airbus A380 in Microsoft Flight Simulator. LatinVFR put a surprise paid superjumbo on the Marketplace, iniBuilds kept its long-running project in view with fresh screenshots, and the double-decker became one of the most talked-about aircraft in the sim. FlyByWire has now closed things out with news of its own, and they are coming in full force with a long-awaited native MSFS 2024 build and significant performance improvements.
Rather than carry its freeware A380X over from the 2020 codebase, FlyByWire has rebuilt it on the MSFS 2024 SDK, which is what unlocks the newer sim’s features. The developer describes this as the first phase of a longer effort, with the early work focused on performance and a more flexible aircraft structure.
A modular A380, starting with a “no cabin” option
The rebuild introduces a modular aircraft system, which lets the team load or leave out specific parts of the aircraft depending on a user’s preference or hardware. The first result is a dedicated “No Cabin” variant that strips out the heavy interior geometry to save resources. To stop the aircraft looking hollow from outside, the team has used parallax window textures, which the developer says create the impression of real interior depth when you look through the windows, down to the actual cabin layout. So a glance through a first-class window should look different to one further back. Both the standard and no-cabin versions appear in the aircraft selection menu and share the same liveries.
FlyByWire says this is only the starting point for the modular framework, and a teaser in the announcement points to another variant already on the way.
Better performance
This is where the update earns its attention. VRAM exhaustion has been one of the most common complaints about MSFS 2024, and the A380 makes the problem worse simply by being enormous. FlyByWire uses a neat comparison to explain why: wrapping an A380 in texture detail is like gift-wrapping a far larger object than an A320, so it needs more “paper,” which in practice means more texture memory. On 8GB cards, that can tip the sim into running out of graphics memory entirely.
To address it, the team reworked how the aircraft handles textures so the sim now pulls the right resolution for your texture setting, with no separate resolution mods needed. Mesh work to cut draw calls is also part of the effort and, the developer notes, still in progress.
The reported numbers are eye-catching. In a deliberately punishing benchmark using the freeware Gatwick scenery at medium-to-high settings, FlyByWire says the older development build maxed out available VRAM and fell to an unusable 10fps average, while both native 2024 variants cut VRAM use by 1 to 2 GB and ran roughly four times faster. Across its wider tester pool, the team reports up to a 50% FPS improvement on some lower-spec systems, with smaller but still noticeable smoothness gains on higher-end machines. FlyByWire recommends that 8GB and 12GB users try medium texture resolution to get the most out of the change.
As always with figures like these, real-world results will depend on your own hardware and settings, and the developer is clear that the current level-of-detail work is an early foundation it plans to refine in later updates.
Lighting, quality-of-life and the end of the 4K/8K split
With the aircraft on the bench, FlyByWire also shipped some changes it had been sitting on. The headline one is cockpit lighting. The team says a reworked main instrument panel lighting setup, first shown around a year ago, was held back by the shared 2020/2024 codebase and has finally made it in, alongside new reading lights. That MIP lighting will also be backported to the MSFS 2020 version, as previously promised. Exterior lighting got a pass too, with taxi-camera lights added and strobe and beacon timings reworked against reference material.
On the quality-of-life side, the windshield and wipers now use the 2024 rain and wiper effects, window plugs were added to match the modelled interior, and there is a new option to hide the sidestick so the OIT is no longer blocked when you are working with charts.
One structural change is worth noting for existing users. From this release onward, FlyByWire is dropping the separate 4K and 8K variants in favour of a single optimised version. The developer says the optimisation techniques it now uses, such as detail maps and the 2024 material shaders, were difficult to apply consistently across multiple texture-resolution builds, so it has settled on one.
Liveries, availability and what comes next
There is a catch for livery users. Because the native build uses a different texture format, existing liveries will not work until they are repackaged. The team has published an updated livery creator package and paintkit to help painters make the switch.
The native 2024 A380X is available now through the FlyByWire installer and website, on the development build. FlyByWire recommends the dev build for all users since it gets active fixes, with the stable channel set to receive the native version at a later point. Looking further out, the developer confirms a native 2024 A32NX is in the works without a date, the modular cabin conversion is still in progress, and MSFS 2024 walkaround support has not been included in this release and remains under evaluation for a later phase.
You can read the full details of this update here.
