Is it something to do with video ram? The pilot skins in Clod are 8192x pixels wide or some such, as opposed to 512x in Il-2. Closing in on a bomber must be pretty demanding when the final LoD kicks in and you have to load all those crew textures.

I would have though a pretty modern 2 GB GPU card like my 6950 (flashed into a 6970) would cope well... as long as the textures are already loaded.
I wondered if the CloD texture manager had sacrificed 'plane textures for landscape in the recent patch and hotfix - and those of us with slowish processors feel it because the texture manager is using the CPU to load them?
But, to be honest, I know nothing about texture management.

56RAF_phoenix

I've no slow downs since the mini fix patch on the ATAG server. Running a GTX480 (1.5Gb vram). Smooth as silk even in 5 plane furballs over land, with all setting maxed out.

In my case, I don´t think it´s a Video-Problem.

Today I flew in the middle of a 9-Bomber-Formation (AI) and had normal FPS, whereas I chased a bf-110 (player) and I had like 5 fps and less...

I can escort a large AI bomber formation with good FPS, even with other human flown 109's, but if a couple of human enemy fighters turn up my FPS can drop significantly.

Were you hi up or on the deck?

I'd turn off grass and trees at the moment. They still cause some issues.

What do you mean by can? It happens from time to time?

@emil: Today it happened close over whater, but 1 hour later i was beyond 100m altitude with 3 other planes and didn´t have a problem....

I flew on the server twice this week, and it happened on the two occasions enemy aircraft tried to attack the bombers.
This was at around 4000 meters.
FPS going down from a pretty solid locked 30 fps (with evga precision tool), to around 14-15.

Well I can confirm that there is nothing in the mission coding that will cause fps slow Down as you approach a plane. There is no vicinity coding that would cause fps drop. This will be something to do with COD coding. I have replicated same issues as you all state on a dedicated server test both over LAN, Internet and direct connect and single player on same mission. Different altitudes etc. my pc has no issues with grass and partical effects even in their broken state.

It feels like the game is stuttering due to a graphical glitch I am sure 1c will overcome.

OH! And for gods sake. It's been years these graphics issues play up on peoples PCs. Put your damn pc specs up if you are going to state an issue. How the hell can people offer you a solution if we don't even know what system you are running! WAKE UP!

did the FPS drop happen after you had been playing for a while?