KIAH Houston Intercontinental: the bargain port that MSFS 2024 has started to strain

On 31 May 2023 a simmer called andy1252 posted a batch of screenshots on AVSIM under the heading "around KIAH and KHOU", and pronounced himself "Distinctly unimpressed" with FSDreamTeam's brand-new Houston. The control tower, he noted, "looks good from the outside but it's all fake — there is no interior." Same with the Skyway train station below it. His verdict on the wider hobby was bleaker still: names he used to trust felt like they were "just churning stuff out a bit now".

The developer replied the next morning to say he was looking at the launch build and should update. He did. Within a day he was back on his own thread, revising in public: "It is a perfectly fine airport at its price point, which is very reasonable. I've certainly paid more for airports that are much more poorly put together."

That twenty-four hours is the whole product in miniature, and it is why KIAH is one of the harder add-ons in this queue to score. Umberto Colapicchioni had already told everybody what he was building. On AVSIM on 24 April 2023, a month before release, answering a customer still angry about FSDreamTeam's Charlotte, he wrote that all their big airports "has been FSX/P3D ports", that KIAH would be one too, that you "can't expect the same kind of detail of something made from the ground up for MSFS" at this size — and that the goal was "more like a 'fly me' airport, rather than a 'show-me' airport". It would, he added, be "priced quite aggressively". It was. It still is.

Three years and a whole new simulator later, the bargain mostly holds and the compromise mostly does not show. What has changed is underneath. KIAH is a scenery built with the MSFS 2020 SDK, running in MSFS 2024 by backward compatibility, and in March 2026 the developer's answer to an eight-month-old bug in that simulator was that the scenery is "100% SDK compliant" and the report should go to Microsoft. Meanwhile the real George Bush Intercontinental opened a $364-million international concourse in October 2024 that the scenery still renders as a construction site.

This review is drawn from 30 sources: the developer's own product page and store, two storefront rating pools totalling 105 customer ratings, eleven threads on FSDreamTeam's own support forum read in full, two AVSIM threads including the developer's own posts, the MSFS official forums, four trade write-ups, two community-built replacement GSX profiles, and three videos. Reddit is blocked in this environment and was not available; for an add-on with this little video coverage, that absence is felt more than usual, and it is worth saying so plainly rather than pretending the sentiment picture is complete.

What you are actually buying

One product, three places to buy it, and the price you pay depends on where you live rather than which you choose.

Where	What you get	Price
simMarket (PID 17858, listed 2 June 2023)	Full build, 2K or 4K ground textures, GSX profile, FSDT Universal Installer	€ 9.99 displayed
FSDreamTeam direct (FastSpring)	Identical	$12.99 (US) plus local tax
In-sim Marketplace (PC and Xbox, added 15 June 2023)	2K ground textures only	$12.99

Three things about that table matter more than the numbers.

First, the € 9.99 is not a sale. The listing carries no discount badge and no 30-day-price-low field — those appear elsewhere on the same page, on an unrelated product, so their absence here is meaningful. € 9.99 is simMarket's standing price and has been since launch. What has moved is FSDreamTeam's own price: a customer noticed the discrepancy on 27 December 2024, and Umberto confirmed on 7 January 2025 that "the price on store page is the correct one" and that the $9.99 on the information page was stale. The launch price was $9.99. The current price is $12.99.

Second, the two figures are not like-for-like. simMarket's terms say displayed prices include the applicable VAT, which for an unresolved browsing session means zero. By simMarket's own converter € 9.99 at 0% is about $11.59, so a US buyer genuinely does pay less there. A German buyer at 19% pays € 11.89, roughly $13.80, and is better off going direct. Nobody is being cheated; the shop windows are simply denominated differently. Do not repeat the "simMarket is cheaper" line without asking where the reader lives.

Third, the Marketplace build is quietly the lesser one. Asked on 25 June 2023 whether the in-sim version offered the 4K ground option, Umberto answered on 4 July 2023 that it does not: "The Marketplace version has the 2K version, because it must be compatible with the very limited memory available on Xbox." That is a reasonable engineering constraint and it appears nowhere in the marketing. If you are on PC and you care about apron resolution — and the launch-week argument says a lot of people do — buy it from simMarket or from FSDreamTeam, not from inside the simulator.

One purchase, two simulators, one SDK

The store badge says MSFS24/20 and the requirements block says "This scenery works in both Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 and 2020". Both are true. One purchase, one installer, both simulators; you point the FSDT Universal Installer at MSFS 2024 and press RELINK.

What that does not mean is a native MSFS 2024 product. FSDreamTeam's compatibility statement of 26 November 2024 is unusually candid: the compatibility updates "are free and just make the same sceneries compatible, without display glitch, in MSFS 2024", while updates "incorporating MSFS 2024 native new features and by reflecting significant real-world changes may come through future paid updates". Twenty-one months later, no such update has appeared for KIAH. The build the 2024 user runs is the 2020 build, and the developer says so himself: on 15 March 2026 he described KIAH as "a 100% SDK compliant scenery made with the 2020 SDK".

What the community consistently praises

Performance, and it is not close. This is the single most repeated finding in the record and the one thing nobody argues with. A simMarket reviewer on 1 June 2023: "I have 50% more FPS than on comparable-sized airports from other devs. By a large margin the best performing bigger airport in all MSFS." Another the same week: "Excellent balance between sharp textures and performance." A third in July 2023: "Performance is good and it looks excellent. Price is a steal!" On AVSIM, even the sharpest critic of the ground textures reported that "other than the few lag spikes the performance was excellent" — and then discovered the spikes were nearby photogrammetry, not the airport. Colapicchioni's stated method holds up: parallax shaders standing in for interiors on buildings you will never enter, a texture budget spent on the terminal core, and a hard eye on the simulator's thousand-object limit when two hundred of those objects are jetways and docking guidance systems.

The airport definition file. The unglamorous part is the part that works. Parking codes are correct, gate names are human-readable rather than MSFS's default gibberish, and the layout has been validated against both FSLTL and FS Traffic. For a five-terminal United hub where the entire point is flying a schedule, this is worth more than another modelled interior, and the people who fly Houston regularly say so.

Terminal C. The one part built from scratch for MSFS rather than ported, with a full interior and GSX "Airport walkers" — passengers you can watch move through the concourse and down the jetway during boarding. Even andy1252, mid-retraction, went back and found it: "here are some shots of the fully modelled Terminal C, for the benefit of anybody who hasn't seen it". A commenter on the flightsim.to profile page put it less carefully: "the passenger walking to the jetway from inside the terminal is so cool!"

GSX Pro is free here. This is the most under-communicated fact about the product and it is worth a paragraph. Asked on 26 May 2023 what a non-owner of GSX Pro would miss, Umberto answered that "KIAH being an FSDT scenery, you are allowed to download and install GSX Pro there, and use it there ( same with all the other FSDT sceneries ) for free". You only pay for GSX if you want it at other airports. A simMarket reviewer as recently as 27 May 2025 still believed the opposite — "the only drawback is that GSX profile does not come with the purchase" — which is wrong twice over: the profile ships with the scenery, and GSX itself costs nothing at this airport.

The developer argues in public. You may find him prickly. You will not find him absent. The AVSIM threads contain long, specific, on-the-record explanations of why KCLT's peripheral lighting is poor, why Zurich is a 2007 port and still his best seller, and what a port can and cannot be. That is a source of information most developers do not provide, and this review would be much thinner without it.

What keeps coming up as a problem

Blurry runway markings on 15L in MSFS 2024. Still open. First reported 3 July 2025, and independently confirmed since by at least seven other users — 22 July 2025, 9 October 2025, 2 November 2025, 5 January 2026, 2 February 2026, 19 February 2026. The centreline and the red hold-short markings render soft until the aircraft is almost on top of them. On 25 July 2025 the developer acknowledged the red markings and guessed at the cause: "I can only guess it's a backward compatibility issue, since these are not native 2024 sceneries." On 15 March 2026, after a customer noted it had been seven months, the position hardened: "How much time the issue has been reported doesn't make much difference: there's nothing wrong with the scenery... if something breaks up in MSFS 2024 because the sim is not 100% compatible with MSFS 2020 as advertised, it should first and foremost reported to Microsoft." He is probably technically right. He is also the person who took the money, and the runway is still blurry.

The real airport has moved on. Still open. Houston's Mickey Leland International Terminal — a $364-million, 400,000-square-foot international concourse replacing all of Terminal D and the Terminal C North domestic concourse — opened to passengers on 22 October 2024. KIAH renders the site as rubble under construction, which is what it was in 2023. Customers have asked three times: 13 April 2024, 11 October 2024 (with an offer to go and photograph it), 24 May 2025. The answer in June 2024 was "If we'll do an update, it will surely be announced here." There has been no announcement. Terminal B North, demolished in the real world, is still standing in the sim.

Peripheral areas are visibly thinner than the core. On 26 September 2025 a customer flying an An-225 into the East Cargo apron found the taxiway textures sharp on EA and EB and "so incredibly low" resolution past the apron boundary on EC, ED and EE. The thread has no reply. A launch-week simMarket reviewer made the same complaint in different words: "There is very little ground clutter, and this makes the airport look very empty. The ground work around ponds and bridges is not done very well." Buy this for the terminal frontages; do not go exploring.

Pink and missing textures on install. Mitigated, not fixed. Reported 27 October 2023, confirmed by a second user 20 November 2023, and eventually solved on 22 November by a workaround from the developer: exclude the Addon Manager folder from your antivirus, uninstall, delete %APPDATA%\Virtuali\UpdateCache and %APPDATA%\Virtuali\PackagesCache, reinstall. Two users confirmed it worked. Then it came back — reported again on 16 July 2024, and in a simMarket review of 9 August 2024: "Great Scenery BUT complex installation, missing textures on the ground with grey/pink tiles in the airport. Did not work for me... They should fix the installation process." The root cause sits in the FSDT Universal Installer, not the scenery, which is exactly why it keeps recurring.

There is no changelog. Asked directly on 29 October 2024 where to find one, a customer got a fair-minded answer from another: "we get 10,000,000 notes about GSX change logs, why is there one not posted for KIAH?" The developer's reply explained that the update in question fixed only MSFS 2024 Alpha display glitches — useful, and only available because somebody asked in the right forum. The last publicly dated build is v1.0.7, 21 November 2024; in September 2025 Umberto confirmed 1.7 was still current, and clarified that the "V2" in the product name means "it's a remake of the original FSX/P3D version, it's not the version number".

And a straggler worth flagging rather than concluding on. On 10 April 2026 a user reported that every runway except 8L/26R "look like disused/overgrown/grass runways" in his install. No replies, no corroboration, one screenshot. It smells like the same 2024 backward-compatibility class as the 15L markings, but one report is not a finding and it is printed here as an open question, not a fact.

Performance and stability

The long stability story of this scenery is a lesson in assigning blame accurately, and it runs from July 2025 to November 2025 across forty-two thousand thread views.

On 29 July 2025 a user reported that KIAH in MSFS 2024 would freeze on spawn or crash to desktop with the iFly 737 MAX 8 and the Fenix Airbus. Five more users joined within seven weeks. The developer could not reproduce it, said so repeatedly, and was accused of not trying. Then on 30 October the reporter clarified something he had said earlier and half-buried: the crash also happened at the default Houston, with FSDreamTeam's scenery uninstalled — as long as GSX was running. "That's changes everything!" Umberto replied, and correctly reframed the problem: GSX makes a Navdata API query on approach to the airport, something in the KIAH area was returning data that crashed SimConnect, and the scenery had nothing to do with it.

He was right. On 31 October 2025 a user reported the freeze gone on the MSFS 2024 Sim Update 4 beta build .19; on 19 November another confirmed it on .25. Asobo's release notes for that beta included fixes to two SimConnect overflow crashes and to the Facilities API. Four months of a very public bug, and it was not the developer's.

Everything else is quieter. There is one 2 August 2023 report of a CTD on Xbox, answered by the developer. There are jetway and parking niggles from launch week, most of them closed. Nobody, in three years of threads and 105 storefront ratings, has said this airport costs them frame rate.

Who should buy it

The United simmer flying Houston as a hub — buy it. This is the profile the product was designed for and the one it serves best. The layout is right, the gate names are right, AI traffic behaves, GSX is free here, and it will not cost you the frame budget you want to spend on the aircraft. The default KIAH is genuinely bad; this is not.

The MSFS 2020 holdout — buy it without hesitation. Every open complaint of any substance in this review is an MSFS 2024 backward-compatibility complaint. In the simulator it was built for, this scenery does what it was sold as doing, at a price that has barely moved in three years.

The GSX Pro owner — buy it, and then go looking for a better profile. The shipped profile is real and substantial. It is also from 2023, and the community has twice replaced it: a French modeller's pushback-procedure rewrite (4,000 downloads, last updated December 2023, described by one user as better than "the default profile is not good"), and a version 2 built in 2025 by a furloughed United ramp agent who added the actual handling companies working Terminal D — WFS, Swissport — because the shipped profile does not have them. Neither is necessary. Both are free.

The MSFS 2024-only flyer who wants everything sharp — think twice. You will be running a 2020-SDK scenery under compatibility, the 15L markings have been soft for over a year, and the developer has stated on the record that he considers that Microsoft's problem. If a fuzzy runway on rotation will spoil the flight, this is not the purchase for you today.

The screenshot photographer and the terminal-interior enthusiast — do not buy it. This is the profile the product actively is not for, and the developer said so before release. Outside Terminal C there are no interiors, only parallax shaders faking depth behind glass. The tower is a shell. The transit station is a shell. Peripheral ground textures are soft. Every one of those is a deliberate trade for frame rate, and if you would rather have made the opposite trade, you will be unhappy for € 9.99 rather than happy.

Where it stands today

KIAH is a good airport that keeps being reviewed against the wrong yardstick. Judged as a 2026 flagship it is dated, patchy at the edges, and missing a major terminal the real airport has had since 2024. Judged as what it is — a heavily reworked port of a 2014 FSX scenery, rebuilt around the two things that make a hub usable, sold for less than half what its shelf neighbours charge — it is one of the more sensible purchases in the MSFS airport catalogue. The storefront numbers agree: 4.4 from 94 in-sim Marketplace ratings, 70% of them five stars; 4.27 by arithmetic from simMarket's eleven, which the site rounds down and displays as a flat 4.

What has genuinely deteriorated is not the scenery but its footing. FSDreamTeam reserved the right in November 2024 to charge for the update that would make its airports natively 2024-aware and bring them up to current real-world configuration, and has not shipped one for Houston. In the meantime the 2024 defects accumulate in the support forum with the same reply each time: SDK-compliant, take it to Microsoft. A customer in July 2025 put the fear directly — "This scenery is now very old and I can't see FSDT updating it further. They appear to have given up on scenery development and are just focusing on GSX." Nothing in the last thirteen months contradicts him.

So buy it for what it does now, at today's price, and price in no future. If the paid native-2024 KIAH ever arrives with the Mickey Leland concourse in it, treat that as a new product and judge it then. If it never arrives, you will still have paid about ten euros for the only serious rendition of a top-fifteen world airport, and it will still load faster and run smoother than most things that cost twice as much.

There is, incidentally, no freeware alternative worth the download and no rival payware KIAH for MSFS at all. Three years after the "hard to believe no KIAH payware" threads on the official forums finally got their answer, FSDreamTeam is still the only answer there is.