Forgive me it this has been asked already, but does CF impart a frame-rate hit? All the meshes and objects (fairways, rough, greens, first cut, bunkers, tees, pins etc.) what wiggle room should I allow for?
If a course I am working on is already running around 70 fps in play mode...do I have too much detail?
CF meshes are 3D objects, which use tris and verts, about as much as the terrain below them does - on top of it. Additional tris and verts are added by using fringes. They also have shaders, layers of multiple textures for surface effects, which are a bit more expensive than the regular terrain textures. So: yes CF does affect the frame rate.
It's impossible to say if your play mode FPS is relevant or not. Usually, the process of building a course for the game changes quite a lot of things, some stuff gets compressed etc, so that you should not place too much importance on your Unity FPS value. The only stat that matters in play mode is the tri-count. We were told to keep it below 3 mio (including everything CF), for the game to run smoothly on older PC's. We are free to exceed this value, though, if we don't care too much about older PC's...
Set your terrain "Pixel Error" Value to 3 (the top setting in the terrain setting, that will help with your tri count). In case you did not know, the terrain resolution of the height map needs to be at 2049 x 2049... Personally, I like to start out very tri-conscious and build as light as possible, and once the plot stands and all the meshes are calculated, I then splurge out on all sorts f goodies that I can "finance" from my remaining tri budget: More trees and grass, objects etc...
And post images of your stuff, one of around 15 course designers out here will be happy to visually inspect your work and offer advise about any number of potential issues...