Five weeks after the first beta build went out, Sim Update 6 is now live for everyone on Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. Just like the updates that preceded it, SU6 comes with an absolutely massive changelog that touches a little bit of everything.
Amidst all the changes, version 1.8.14.0 arrives with the two headline items the community had been waiting on since FSExpo, bush trips and the option to skip the walkaround, plus a career mode pass that removes some of the more frustrating ways a mission could go wrong through no fault of the pilot.
There is one item that changed between beta and release, though, and it’s the one AMD owners will notice first.
FSR 4 is out, FSR 3 is back in
When the SU6 beta opened on 6 July, native FSR 4 support was one of the two big graphics stories, alongside DLSS 4.5. For Radeon 7000 and 9000 series owners it meant no longer needing OptiScaler to get the newer AMD upscaler running in the sim.
That’s not what shipped. Microsoft says FSR 4 was tested during the public beta, but the final SU6 build reverts to FSR 3 because of an incompatibility between FSR 4 frame generation and rendering to multiple windows. The team says it is working with AMD on a fix for a future Sim Update, and notes that the FSR 3 now in place is the same version that shipped with Sim Update 5.1.
The NVIDIA side is unaffected. DLSS 4.5 is in as the default native upscaler, with Dynamic Frame Generation and in-game VSync support, which is the outcome we were hoping for when we looked at what DLSS 4.5 would mean for the sim back in April. The in-game menu will now also display which FSR version your GPU software is actually using, which removes some of the guesswork that came with the earlier “AMD FSR on or off” approach.
Elsewhere in the graphics section: cockpit texture and LoD popping is improved, raymarched shadows at distance are fixed, and blurry secondary aerials have been addressed.
Bush trips, properly this time
Bush trips are now available from the Activities menu. They first appeared in beta build 1.8.8.0 back in July, and the plan Jörg Neumann outlined at the FSExpo keynote in June was to port all 59 of the MSFS 2020 bush trips across to 2024.
It’s worth remembering that back at the April roadmap presentation, bush trips were pencilled in for Sim Update 7 “if not earlier”. They arrived one update early, which is great.
The EFB has been updated to support them properly. Bush trip leg descriptions and thumbnail images now show up in the navigation log, and the thumbnails can be enlarged with a click. Guided Tours also get their own section in the Activities menu.
The walkaround is finally optional
The other long-running request is in. Under assistance settings there is now an option to start a Free Flight without the walkaround, which Microsoft explicitly attributes to community feedback.
This one took a while. MSFS 2024 launched in November 2024 with the walkaround as a mandatory step before every flight, and a sizeable part of the community never took to it. Twenty months later, the people who want to load straight into the cockpit can.
Career mode gets new retouches
The MSFS 2024 career mode continues to receive some much needed fixes and refinements. For example, aborting a mission now grants a partial payout based on how far you got, which already happened after a crash to desktop or a disconnection. More significantly, career can now identify mission failures caused by things that aren’t the pilot’s doing: aircraft WASM issues, incorrect aircraft configurations after using Skip or Back-on-Track, and airport surface problems. When one of those is detected, you no longer take aviator performance penalties, score reductions, reputation loss, or wear-and-tear damage requiring repairs.
Night missions at unlit airports also return, now at small single-runway grass airfields, with an increased difficulty bonus attached. Mission briefings include runway lighting information and highlight the extra difficulty, and there’s a warning icon plus extra rewards on missions that start or end at night on an unlit runway. Runway lighting itself has been fixed at 742 airports.
A few other career adjustments:
- In Employee Mode, selecting an aircraft in the filters now switches all compatible missions to that aircraft rather than hiding them
- “No Skip Bonus” has been replaced by “Skip Cost”, with a different calculation behind it
- Out of bounds and away-from-flightplan failures have been removed, as has the prohibited airspace penalty
- A notification now warns you if you try to take off with the doors open
Night lighting, and an old ILS annoyance
MastLights have been added to a large number of generic airports ranging from M to XXL sizes, with automatic placement, which should improve illumination at parking spots after dark. This follows the generic airport lighting work that arrived in the first beta build.
Tucked into the NavData section is a change we noted during the beta and which is worth repeating now that it’s public: ILS localizers and glideslopes are now aligned with runways when they aren’t intentionally offset, and a threshold crossing height has been added for the glideslope. If you’ve flown an approach with the needles centred while the PAPI insisted you were low, this is the fix for that. Microsoft has also added GBAS/SBAS path points and GLS facilities, though GLS approaches themselves are not in yet, along with an LPV200 flag for approach navigation data.
Stability and the aircraft list
On the stability side, the WASM systems loading fix is the notable one, since it was responsible for infinite loading with some aircraft including the ES30. There’s also a fix for the frame rate cap not being ignored during initial boot, which was slowing startup down, a fix for a PS5 crash tied to procedural building generation, and a fix for a rare crash with raytraced shadows enabled.
The aircraft section runs long. A330 operators get an APU that no longer burns roughly 8,000 lbs of fuel per hour, along with a fix for TCAS warnings that stayed permanently active with live traffic and a correction to the EFB confusing cruise flight level with flight altitude. The H225 receives more than a dozen fixes covering fuel cut-off handles, GPS RNAV lateral guidance and autostart behaviour. The CJ4 gets model and texture optimisation, corrected takeoff and landing performance calculations with headwind factored in, and a fix for a bug where it could load the 747 cargo model instead of itself.
EFB tablets have been added to a long list of aircraft that were missing them, including the 787-10, both 747-8 variants, the Longitude, TBM 930, SR22, Vision Jet and the Global Supertanker. The Volocopter Volocity received what amounts to a rebuild, with more than twenty separate fixes covering controls, propeller animation, multiplayer audio and career availability.
Before you update
The standard advice applies. Microsoft’s own note at the top of the release says outdated community folder packages can affect performance and behaviour on PC, and recommends moving them out if you hit stability issues or long loading times.
SU6 has since been followed by newer updates. You’ll find the current MSFS 2024 version and the full update history on our MSFS 2024 updates page.
