Somewhere I thought we could collect some pics for the new map release today. The news topic was here - DCS Mariana Islands Map
Performance is very good, so far feels more like Caucasus-like framerates rather than Syria.
Andersen AFB looking good.
Some nice tropical looking houses.
Textures down low not super high, but nice to see some different forest cover.
A lot of blue obviously, but good for Naval gazing.
It looks divine, the water looks inviting and the palm trees will make a perfect backdrop for huey ops
You read my mind, but I went blue, put on a bit of weight and added a fan.
Going to try it in VR and will report back.
EDIT: VR is very smooth and performs well. It makes ugly screenshots though.
LOL, me too!
The LOD on the rocks is a little low, but probably my VR settings. There’s lot of little places to explore, so this is just fantastic as a free map. They could have definitely charged for this, so great to see.
Not on my end, I went flying first with Hind and then in the Bug. In central Guam I went from 60-70 (usual frames on other maps) to 20 and even slighlty below.
I think it’s time to tweak the settings again… or upgrade my PC ;(
The map is only half the space on the drive, but that’s all concentrated in a few areas.
I want to take a test drive using CA around some of those roads, as well as do some helo flights and, of course, carrier ops!
You erased the shaders?
CA will be interesting, as the map is either hills, solid towns/houses or solid trees, so for ground combat I’m sort of curious if the land path-finding will work ok on this one. Syria and PG have some nice open areas for tanks, while this one not so much.
It’s sort of a more extreme tree version of Cypress in a way, and all the rock work reminds me of that.
I stopped doing this basically since 2.7 came out. Didn’t noticed any change after few last updates. But might as well erase them and fxo folder too.
Yeah, I know it may be a very light palliative but worth a try…
Holy shortcut!
I did not think about that!
I’ve not measured the frames, I’ll do that now. Just need a repeatable free-fight as I like to record them to see what’s up when changing settings/drivers etc.
I went with the Instant Action for the Hornet - Hot Start.
The downside with that is that it starts on the Carrier with 10 broken LOD static F/A-18C’s in front of you, so not ideal. I was looking for something where it flew over and I could record unattended.
I’ve used the Hornet Free Flight and started recording for 60 seconds here (just past the fleet), as the flight goes over the entire island from sea to sea (I set RALT, ATC and ATTH so I can reproduce it again):
So all those trees do take a hit for sure. These are VR fps in a Reverb i9/32GB/2080 on a 60 second sample, 2nd run:
(Note: obviously these are measuring different things, as three flights over three maps isn’t going to be th same, so really just a taster.)
You can see when I arrive over the island with tree details set to 100% and then get to the sea again. 
It does feel ok in VR though, so it’s almost a shame to measure it. Quantum effect! 
Yeah, seems the trees bog down the fps count. I paused the sim over Andersen AFB and took two pics from different angles (tried zooming in/out - it didn’t changed much in fps count).
View towards south-east direction - 55 FPS
View towards west direction - into the forest - 29 FPS.
At least deleting the shaders did something, as this time the lowest the FPS went over Guam was in high 20s instead of high 10s…
I think the tree and details sliders are dynamic now, so you can do them in-game without even leaving the cockpit? It would be interesting to fiddle with those and see what benefit you get. There’s certainly a lot of trees 
Really? I haven’t noticed those options being available while in the sim. Will check it out later, have to hit the sack. Thanks for the tips!
Back from work and downloading the map. Looking forward to trying it
I am having trouble getting it to d/l, it quits game when you select the marianas in the module manager then does nothing!
