We knew it was coming soon but all of the sudden, here it is, DCS: Marianas Islands has released for DCS World bringing with it a new type of map and one that is free to all DCS World pilots. This should be very interesting to see in action!
Heading over to the Pacific
DCS: Marianas Islands is a very interesting release for DCS World. This 1,500 x1,500 km in size map is made up of mostly ocean and is big enough to allow for wide scale carrier based battles. The islands that make up the Marianas Islands chain are making use of the latest scenery technology that Eagle Dynamics has been working on and is likely to represent the new standard for DCS World maps. It’s also free!
Check out the launch trailer and then get your DCS World install updated and ready for the new map.
Stormbirds 
It was a nice surprise to come home to. I tried it out for a few minutes and it looks pretty sweet. Tonight I’ll do some more sightseeing. The only problem was you have to go looking for it on Steam; it’s isn’t (wasn’t) listed anywhere, you have to type it in to find it. But there it was and it downloaded fast and easy.
My first and only visit so far was coming into Guam from the south in the Ka-50, from about fifty kilometers out. As I got closer, looking at the terrain through the Shkval MFD, I couldn’t help thinkin that I was approaching Skull Island. I was half expecting a giant monkey to be standing there.
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It was a surprise! I’ve done about 45 minutes of flying around the islands now and will have a first impressions piece up soon but I have to say that I’m impressed! (And it was free)
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Gosh, I was just about taking a sip from my breakfast coffee when I saw the headline…
Can’t wait for a first fly around come evening.
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I know I can’t complain that much because it is free after all, but the FPS drop is even worse than the worst days on the Syria map, specially on VR.
So far it is quite unplayable and they have acknowledged it. Even with further optimization pass they just increased VR recommended settings to a 2080 ti and i7 9700 processor.
For a map that is essentially 97% water.
The PR team is going to be quite busy the next weeks. Steam reviews are already on the “mixed”
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Oh really? Is this a VR only experience because my frame rate was rock solid through my whole tour.
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Don’t get me wrong, if I play on flat screen with top settings I get over 45 FPS no problem (while I can get almost 80 on Syria)
The problem is that using the same settings that give me VSync stable 45 fps on any DCS map, on an empty Marianas map I only get 20-22 fps. Hell, even spawning on Farallon (the tiny bomb range island to the north) have really bad fps, and we are talking everything but a small patch of land is just water.
Even flying over empty water I get less fps than I get while flying on the mediterranean on Syria or the Gulf.
Something is really taxing the software on this map, so much they just bumped the minimum settings by a whole generation of software.
I don’t think this map will be very popular.
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Don’t forget that Syria was pretty brutal on some when it came out as well. This map is pushing new technologies and ED will need to sort out how best to make this map more efficient.
I think we’ll see a progression of performance updates for this map now that they have a kind of baseline. Project that into the future and I think they will use that on future maps…but how better to test it than see how it works on a wide variety of systems.
For me, it was very smooth and frame rates never glitched, stopped, stuttered or anything. Mind you it was a clear map with nothing going on but I am legitimately surprised at how badly it’s working for others. VR is a bit of an exception but with my system being somewhat old now, I would expect others should be having a better time.
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Yes, please remember, we put out a FAQ and we did state that some optimization and bug fixing is ongoing that will impact performance. But in the same breath, this is a free map for DCS, it should be something that will be somewhat future proof, so it could be on the low end for some right now, but its a map we expect to be very busy and to be very heavily used long into the future, much like the Caucasus Map.
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Thanks for the comments NineLine! I have quoted from the Q&A a couple of times in my follow-up first flights article.
Performance is good on my older system so I suspect a combination of optimization and user settings may help to make this an enjoyable experience.
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I should also add, be careful of comparisons to other maps, flying over the Islands in most if not all cases have way more objects due to trees. You can fly over the ocean and have much better FPS, but comparing it to even the densest areas in Syria or other maps in most cases is not a fair comparison to the density of objects on the Marianas map. thanks!
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Absolutely, the added details are jaw dropping!
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Glad to hear it Shamrockionefive, thanks for helping get the word out, and helping people get things dialled in. We appreciate it!
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2700X, 32GB RAM, SSD’s and an RX 6800. In my Rift S this map is totally unplayable, even after dumping everything to low. When I look out the front of the aircraft it is reasonably smooth, but turn my head sideways either way and the terrain stutters so badly it is nauseating. By the gods we need multicore/multithread AND Vulkan.
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It seems that VR is a real problem for this map.
It has been a while since we’ve heard about Vulkan and their new rendergraph engine.
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Here is an update. Some legend dropped an FSR update on github. I have tried this and it has made a huge overall performance difference in VR. Most notibly, the micro stutter when looking sideways is gone on all maps. The Marianas map is performing a LOT better now! I hope that FSR technology is implimented natively into DCS as it benefits users of AMD and nVidia cards and that along with the long talked about core updates, DCS becomes the unchallenged number one. I would like to see some sort of video on an in-house early build of Vulkan/multicore/rendergraph etc as I’m sure 100% of the community would.
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