Sim Update 6: The Bush Trips Return, DLSS 4.5, and What Else Landed in MSFS 2024

Sim Update 6 rolled out to all platforms this week - version 1.8.14.0 - and where SU5 was the stability blockbuster, this one is the content release: the single most-requested restoration in MSFS 2024's life, a new default upscaler, real VR gains and the usual thousands of fixes. It also quietly dropped one promised feature on the way out of beta. The rundown, and what to actually do with it.

The bush trips are back

The headline in three words. Bush trips - the guided multi-leg VFR adventures that were among MSFS 2020's best-loved content - are now in MSFS 2024, ported across and living in the Activities menu. For anyone who joined the sim with 2024, this will be a genuine discovery rather than a reunion: a bush trip is a hand-crafted journey of short legs between small strips - fjords, deserts, archipelagos - flown low, navigated visually leg by leg, with progress saved as you go. No airliner, no autopilot, usually no GPS worth leaning on: just the stick-and-rudder flying this series keeps prescribing, wrapped in scenery chosen by someone with taste.

If you want names for the nostalgia: the ported set includes the originals that defined the format - the Nevada trip that taught a generation of 2020 pilots what a Cub was for, Patagonia's glacier-and-fjord epic, the Balkans' village-hopping - along with the years of trips that followed them across deserts, archipelagos and mountain ranges. Veterans will head straight for old favourites; newcomers should know the early legs of any trip are deliberately gentle, and the difficulty curve is part of the design.

They are also, quietly, the best structured training content in the base sim - every leg ends in an arrival at a strip that is short, sloped, obstructed or all three, which makes a bush trip a touchdown-discipline syllabus wearing an adventure costume. We will publish a full guide to flying them well - which trips to start with, and the short-field technique they assume you have - next week.

DLSS 4.5: the new default

MSFS 2024 now supports NVIDIA DLSS 4.5, and it becomes the default upscaling option on hardware that supports it. The iteration on DLSS 4 targets the artefacts simmers actually notice: less shimmering on distant autogen and power lines, reduced ghosting on the propeller arc and moving traffic, sharper texture reconstruction at high output resolutions. On mid-range RTX cards this is effectively free image quality - and if you locked in your settings after SU5's performance pass, it is worth a fresh look: many pilots will find a notch more quality or a notch more headroom waiting.

The beta subplot deserves a sentence of honesty: AMD's FSR 4 was trialled during the SU6 beta and did not survive to release - it was pulled before the final build. Radeon pilots keep FSR 3.1 for now, with FSR 4 presumably returning when it meets the bar. Disappointing, but a feature cut in beta is the beta process working as designed.

VR, the walkaround, and the fix list

Three more items earn their place in a summary. PSVR2 got a real pass - better clarity in the centre of the field of view, improved performance and reduced memory use - which matters because console VR is where the new VR pilots are; PC headset users share in the general VR improvements too.

The walkaround is now skippable in Free Flight - an option in the assistance settings starts you at the aircraft without the exterior inspection ritual. File under small-thing-enormous-quality-of-life: the walkaround is lovely the first dozen times and a tax on every quick circuit session thereafter. Turning a six-lap pattern evening from click-heavy to instant is exactly the kind of friction removal that changes how often people actually fly.

And beneath the headlines, the release notes run to the usual thousands of entries: aircraft updates across the fleet, avionics fixes, and stability work continuing SU5's trajectory. The cadence Microsoft promised back in April - big fix-focused updates alternating with content drops - is now demonstrably the operating rhythm, with World Update 23 next on the calendar for September.

For pilots watching from the other cockpit, the upscaler news lands differently but the season rhymes: X-Plane's 12.4.4 with its new panel-graphics API is due this quarter per Laminar's expo roadmap, with the big 12.5.0 flight-model release behind it. Both platforms are shipping their promises this year, which remains the healthiest sentence one can write about this hobby.

What to do with it this week

Fly one bush trip leg tonight. Don't overplan it - open Activities, pick a trip whose scenery calls to you, fly the first leg. One leg is twenty minutes and it will recalibrate what you think the sim is for. (Then read next week's article before leg two - there is technique to this.)

Re-run your graphics settings. Ten minutes: switch to DLSS 4.5 if offered, fly your usual stutter-test approach, and bank whatever quality or frames you find.

Turn off the walkaround for practice sessions. Assistance settings. Keep it on for the Sunday long-hauls if the ritual pleases you; kill it for training nights. Lowering the cost of starting is the most underrated flying improvement there is.

PSVR2 pilots: just fly. The clarity pass needs no configuration - your Tuesday circuit session simply looks better now.

And do the boring add-on check. The standard post-Sim-Update ritual applies: before your first serious flight, confirm your payware aircraft and key scenery have SU6-compatible builds - developers push compatibility patches in the days around any update, and a mid-ocean avionics blackout is a poor way to discover you skipped one. Five minutes in your content manager saves the evening.

The bigger picture

Step back and 2026's shape is becoming clear. Two Sim Updates in, the platform is measurably more solid than it was in March; the content calendar has delivered a continent, thirty-one national parks and now the return of the 2020 era's best-loved feature; and the community's chronic launch-year grievances are being retired one release at a time. There is plenty still on the wishlist - live weather's quirks and ATC's limitations top it as ever - but the trajectory argument is over: MSFS 2024 in August 2026 is the sim its launch promised.

Which makes this a good moment for the perennial reminder: updates are only as good as the flying they produce. The bush trips are back, the strips are short, and every one of those arrivals is a landing worth measuring. Record them, and next week we will talk about how to fly them properly.