Maps loading slowly

I don't know how long you've had F8 but the map loading is now very good. After about 2 months of release it was a complete disaster. The map loading will remain like this because the F8 hardware is very weak. It suffers from very weak RAM. If I'm not mistaken, F8 got 5MB RAM again like F7,F6. Terrain shading was added to the maps. Try turning it off, loading will be quite fast but the maps won't be as nice anymore. Unfortunately, weak HW.

It took me a while to realise there were two gb topo maps one for contours 62mb and one main 1.4gb i switched all details off which i dont need for driving still no luck,

I read about the 5mb ram but I don't recall my mk2i being like this, very poor and unusable driving which I've never had an issue with before, it worked perfectly on my mk2i including turn by turn prompting

Strange they put such old prosessor in a premium watch and nobody talking about it. 3 years old, and almost like it can't run maps. Have to turn off everything. Should be a warning to not buy amoled because of the resolution and old prosessor.

Resolution is ok, pointless given functionality

I’m totally new at this but, can’t you use Garmin Explore to create the maps you need and sync with your device? Only loading what you need seems like it would be much faster.

Admittedly, I don’t know much about Garmin Explore 

Of course, but the whole point is to be able to do it on the fly on the watch, for £1000 that's not an unreasonable expectation

That's why you won't find an official description of the hardware anywhere. Because they knew people probably wouldn't like it.

I only got it for dive features because they didn't bring out a 47mm descent, its not bad from that perspective, but I wouldn't have got it otherwise, fenix 7 is probably better, matured updates, everything works etc

So I've finally got round to testing mapping by creating an activity app for driving.  The reason I choose driving is the speed and requirement to reroute tests the watches capabilities in ways 'slower' activities dont.

To start lots of setting configurations are needed, lock on road, follow route, more accurate gps settings, city mapper rather than topo etc to ensure it follows route rather than straight line etc.  Gps fix was fast even sitting in the car.

First off when putting in a destination no alternatives are offered, unlike car nav, this forces constant rerouting that failed and crashed watch first time after 4th reroute.  Only settings available are setting destination to shortest distance or fastest, though not sure how thats determined.  The constant rerouting failed when it didnt crash and ends up just tracking with a pop up 'route calculation failed'. Rerouting and recalculation was painfully slow and unusable in practice.

When I did finally get it to work the closer I got to my destination in a city the quicker it rerouted when taking a route separate to the one chosen. 

While the maps are unreadable for driving the turn prompting worked really well but only has sound not vibration which is irritating as I had vibration on my mk2i before.  Comparatively mk2i was flawless doing all of this.  While turn prompting worked in real time even after recalculation the maps took ages to catch up and load, sometimes just being a black screen.  All the other metrics were there and worked fine. 

Overall it could work but processing is not upto it, it would be nice to have options for routes you could pick at the start like any satnav, inc garmins, and speed cameras info would be nice.  I appreciate it's not supposed to do this but it should be able to given price.  For slower activities it would work fine i guess but still slow updates/ recalculation if you detour.

As a position tracker it was flawless as you'd expect.

6049280 said:

Strange they put such old prosessor in a premium watch and nobody talking about it. 3 years old, and almost like it can't run maps

A new processor suitable for a watch like this simply doesn't exist. All modern sport watches seem to use the same SoC (system on chip). But many other modern watches recently released by Suunto, Coros, and Polar have additional 32 MB of operating memory to help with caching the maps while Garmin chose to not have that, so Fenix 8 has a puny 5 MB of operating memory on SoC and no additional memory. That's the main reason maps are slow.