I’ve only had time to test using the Black Death track, and recorded the following:
Ver.17582: 42/99/7 (avg/max/min)
Ver.18301: 40/95/5 (avg/max/min)
Settings: 1920 x 1080, all quality ‘High’, AA, A-EF, SSAO and VSYNC ‘Off’, Grass, Shadows and Roads ‘On’, using SMAA and cpu @ 4.20GHz.
Subjectively, the first run displays less hesitation when caching textures and differs little from subsequent runs – seems to me that this function has been tweaked? The only graphic glitch I saw were the burning aircraft through the BF109’s fuselage when it flies part the runway, which is as it was previously.
The biggest news for Cayman users is that there are no longer blue lines displayed on the horizon at low altitude
Update: despite the BD track results, in-game performance seems to have improved. I flew the quick missions over Dover, Le Havre and London and found frame rates to be generally higher. Flying between the chimney stacks in Le Havre the frame rate is now limited by VSYNC (I only disable this when running the benchmark), and at 500 feet over London I previously had 29-34fps, now I get 36-42fps with no visible graphic difference. The new tree LOD is a bit distracting, but the missing blue lines error is the biggest improvement for me.