[adonys]

is indeed out of the box, but just give it a try, it did removed the stutters for me, in my signature rig. It also didn't improved/worsened the FPS.

Regarding the explanation: unlimited buildings setting means it has ALL the buildings laid out by the level designers loaded via thee terrain prediction loader, ie in the patches ahead of you = a slower speed a loading new, unloading old building resources (having them all displayed and rendered means there's a high probability a building's resources are already loaded into memory, and a lower probability they will be unloaded as it might yet still be in use in some other part of the currently displayed map).

The "optimization" which actually consists in loading just a part of the houses also means a higher probability to have a certain resource loaded/unloaded, which results in bigger amount of HDD-RAM streaming data streaming, which is exactly the thing causing the stutters (see Kegety's performance mods, it's clear that IL2 somehow messes up the dynamic DDS mipmap generation, combined with extremely large textures).

I guess that's why they were working on Carmack's Megatexture technology (see the leftover from the conf.ini), but it seems to not be ready yet.