The patch improved things for me over land, but i still got stutters over the sea when approaching other aircraft (especially bombers) or using the zoomed-in view to look at them.
I was using the 15 setting to run on all cores but since it mostly loads the first core that's available to it and only uses the others in "spikes" as needed, most of the sim ends up running on the same core as the OS.
I started using the 14 setting yesterday to run it on the remaining three cores and i saw a big improvement, since it now mostly uses the 2nd core which is relatively free.
Stutters still happen from time to time but i guess that's mostly about how the sim loads whatever comes in viewing distance plus my amount of RAM and my background applications.
I might get a couple of stutters during the initial head-on merge in a 6vs6 dogfight or 6vs9 intercept but it's perfectly playable after 2-3 minutes. The same happens when crossing the coast, a few stutters while it's loading the textures and then it's mostly smooth.
I actually set trees back to low (i had them at very low before that), i use high detail for aircraft models and damage decals, cockpit shadows and roads on, land shadows, building amount and building detail on low, any remaining settings on medium, x1 anti-aliasing, 1680x1050 resolution.
My system is an i7 920 @ stock 2.7 Ghz, Asus P6T v2 motherboard, 3x1Gb RAM in triple channel, Ati 4890 1GB, win7 pro x64.
It's far from shabby but it's not cutting edge either, so i'm definitely encouraged to see the sim improving in playability without having to upgrade anything
