First impressions

After watching all the videos of DCS Syria map, I knew I wanted to buy from day one.

I bought it and I flew around several locations in the map: Haifa, Beirut, Raqqa, Palmyra and a few other towns I don't remember.

I don't have a powerful hardware configuration, as you can read in my signature, but I found (low enough) settings to get an average of 60 fps on Caucasus: medium visibility, high quality textures, 4x anisotropic filtering, low water quality, clutter/grass and tree visibility to minimum, no shadows, no anti-aliasing). With such settings, Caucasus doesn't look bad but I have the ugly popping tree effect.

Now to Syria map. I was afraid to get poor fps, like in the Channel map. That was my first good surprise: 60 fps over countryside / desert, and "only" a drop to 40 fps over very dense cities like Beirut or Haifa, which I consider excellent on my configuration. These cities have such a level of detail that it's unbelievable that I still have a decent frame rate. The layout and main buildings are also accurately represented. In the country side, my other good surprise was the trees. I can see "all" the trees all over my medium visibility range and they all look really good, much better than the Caucasus trees and without any mushroom popping effect, all that with my tree visibility setting at minimum! At long range, you can barely notice new trees coming in because it's done so smoothly. Despite my low water quality settings, the transitions between water and land on the coasts look great too.

Overall, the map has a good variety of landscapes and countries, some of the best towns I've seen in any other DCS map, and it's a region that can be rich in missions and campaigns. This weekend, I definitely want to fly over the map at low speed and even lower altitude with an helicopter just to enjoy the scenery.

So far, for me, this is one of the best maps available for DCS so far. I just can't imagine how great it would look like on a high-end PC and graphical card!

:thumbup:

Spectacular map. So many amazing places to explore in all aircraft.. & vehicles!