I think the buildings amount setting partially controls their draw distance.

I run the sim on a two year old PC (i7 920 @ 2.7Ghz, Ati 4890 1Gb and just 3Gb of RAM) so there has to be a compromise.

What i did was set buildings amount to high/unlimited so they draw further away from me, but i set their detail to low/lowest so that they don't take up a lot of FPS. This way i get good enough results because they don't pop up as much and since they are set to low detail they don't noticeably re-texture as i get closer to them, unless i'm landed and taxing towards one.

It definitely helps, but at anything over 1000 feet or so the 'bubble' of draw distance is incredibly visible. I play with buildings unlimited as well, but I still get a little disappointed seeing the draw distance.

Like I said earlier, I believe that the first patch reduced the draw distance significantly as part of the performance improvements. Might this actually have resulted (for some, not all) in more frequent loading throughout flight over land - a possible cause of stutter? I'd expect more powerful systems to render further to reduce load-frequency, obviously less powerful systems would struggle.

Really it should be selectable, a la Arma2 etc - that way we could tweak settings to suit our preference.