The Asobo and Microsoft teams have released the new Sim Update 2 for Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024, bringing a lot of important changes to the platform released in November. This includes general stability improvements, bugs and aircraft systems, as well as developer tools.
The simulator now has the capability of reducing the size of the rolling cache, which wasn’t possible beforehand. The loading times are also improved, and more information is available in the debug page, including available VRAM on your GPU, latitude, longitude and altitude to ease any issue solving in the simulator.
Speaking of performance, the update also promises to improve the stability of the simulator, with better VRAM utilisation and newly added FSR frame generation for older GPUs or GPUs with no NVIDIA frame generation, which was already available in the beta testing of this update. Alongside Sim Update 2, those who own NVIDIA GPUs are getting a new driver update to make the best of this new simulator update. Some improvements were made to the backwards compatibility of 3rd party packages as well.
Moving over to general improvements, the Sim Update 2 fixes duplicates inside content.xml and removes them each boot, the avatar now has footsteps, tail numbers of planes should now be displaying correctly, and custom characters can no longer be entered. VR aspect of the simulator got some improvements, too, improving panel ratio, appearance of the toolbar and some 3D UI elements were changed to improve the overall experience.
Speaking of aircraft improvements, the team fixed the missing tooltips in the cockpit camera, highlights for elements and copilot visibility. Individual updates, improving certain aircraft significantly, include the Aeroelvira Optica, Air Tractor AT-802, Airbus A400M and the iniBuilds A3XX series, including the A310, A321, A330 and the Beluga.
Some changes were made to streamed packages and the world, too. This includes rolling cache efficiency and blur in aerial imagery should now be reduced. The airports got some love as well, and Gaya Simulations fixed a lot of the default airports, including Paris Charles de Gaulle, Gibraltar, Toncontin and Queenstown.
The update is now available to everyone who owns Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024. As the update is quite extensive, you can get into the details on the Flight Simulator website here. If you would like to see our opinions on Microsoft Flight Simulator in our editorial content, check out Tim’s review of the Career Mode in this simulator.
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