yup lol figured this out the hard way the worst settings are at the top of the lists and the best at the bottom. tried with both and with anti aliasing at 0 and at 8 made no noticeable difference with the fps it was still very smooth and probably around 50fps with max and more at minimum but that 1-2 second pause about every 5 seconds was still there on both settings as well as a lot of strange goings on with the rendering of just about anything that was farther away then 100 feet from the plane.

Ok time to get really honest :P I have been self teaching my way around a computer for about 15 years but laziness combined with a lack of drive has contained my over all knowledge of how to build, repair, and just over all manipulate my own computers to a bare minimum. (I makem game runem someum timeum)

LOL I used to be so proud of myself when I would just copy and paste a boot disk one of my smart friends had made to make a game run for me (386 and 486dx2) and got another game to run on the same boot disk.

with that said i have been to my CCC panel and i can see both cards i think one seems to be running and the other sitting idle. i dont know if this is how they normally are when no programs are running or if the guy that built my computer for me just knew that i would never know if they were both actually working or not LOL

I just assumed that when two cards were in there and connected via the crossfire plug that they were both working.

I did not see any option that said to disable either card nor did i see one that gave me the option as to what i wanted each card to handle.

I apologize for my electrical ignorance ahead of time. I will gladly test any configuration that you guys are willing to walk me through :)

As far as I saw, the stutters might be caused by sounds/effects.

Disable all sounds (from config file), and give it another go. Then try again without/lowest effects.

Now, if this proves right (as it seemed to me when I've tried it yesterday, but I only have a crappy laptop in here in London, my computer monster sits at home in Bucharest), then this, corelated with what Oleg said about multicore/multithreading (that only the sounds are actually made on different threads), then it means we are in front of poor multi-threading programming (stutters caused by the main process waiting signal clearance from threads finishing their job).

what exactly do i need to turn off in the sound section of the config file? i tried setting engine sound to 0 and it was still there in game?

PS i might have been incorrect at the amount of fps i was previously getting it turns out that over (water only) even with sounds running and everything maxed out i get almost flawless performance but the second there is any land rendering in site this drastically declines to the point that if i am over london even with everything turned completely down as far as it will go i still get plenty of tearing, clipping and lag.

I would like to try this once i have turned the sound off like you said and see if it makes a difference but as it stands the only place that i could dog fight would be over water. land is out completely as i cant go any lower on settings and it is still awful.

try it from inside the game then, settings, audios section. uncheck both music and sound

done

all that goes away when i do this is the menu and ingame music as well as the radio chatter. the engine and gun sounds stay as well as the opening video sound.

and the game still stutters?

anyway, if you are still hearing some sounds, it means the audio engine is not completely shut down, so it might still cause stuttering (if it is the cause for them).

yea i would really like to test this out but im afraid to mess with the config file too much ..... i will copy it and then play with it tomorrow and see if i can get the sound completely disabled im very curious to see the outcome.

Might be a stupid question, but you don't have Windows Live Messenger or something similar running in the backgound on your pc (in the taskbar for instance) do you? I've seen this affect Arma2 in this way (the 5sec micropause) as though its checking/pinging something - just a thought to knock off anything like that, that may be running.

I have a similar rig (i5-760 + 1x 6870) and i won't spend even $1 to get this game running, i'll wait until 19th april and hope that the fps gets fixed, or i'll stick with ROF and IL-2 and wait till 2013.

Please keep us informed about your stutter issue, i've seen that on gta4 and gears of war, 5 second stutters... solved using ccleaner and reinstalling the drivers.