S!
No worries Gunny
Happens to all of us. I have Tessellation Off all the time as I do not play games that have it so basically EVE Online, World Of Tanks and IL-2:CoD
I noted that I get less stutter if I set Building amount to Unlimited. Then they are all already on map thus no loading or popping up. Only thing is the LOD on them..with low setting they are like brown boxes and turn to houses within a radius of your plane(like in old IL-2) and that can cause stutter. Again if you set Very High detail to buildings sure no brownie huts but has an impact on FPS.
For me most stutter is caused by SSAO. With it off I have a lot smoother experience with minimal effect on image. Really hard to tell the difference. FPS hit is 10-20fps and that can be a lot in certain scenarios.
Also shadows cause some of the stutter as they seem to have at least 2 LOD's. One farther away and when you are close(within the "sphere of LOD") they turn more solid and less flickery. Shadows also have this strange anomaly that they "stretch" at certain angles and look like lines. So clearly something could be done to shadows, be it total rework or more options.
Trees have same, farther away they look different and when again closer get more detailed. Gotta say I liked IL-2 original Forest=3 more than this and had basically NO effect on FPS. Actually was better than Forest=1-2. I use trees at Very High as I get less stutter with them that way.
Grass. I find it the most useless feature and have it off. Sure it will add something when taking screenies from ground etc. but when flying just a resource strain IMO adding nothing to the experience as the grass appears also within this "sphere of LOD" around the plane.
I wish Luthier would get in contact with AMD, at least their Driver Boss is on Twitter and for sure would be interested to get CoD to run on AMD hardware well. IMO flight sim genre is so small that favoring one brand is like shooting oneself in the leg by leaving out some players due certain features etc. I really do not care if a shooter game is optimized for one or another brand, I do not play them
Anyways, back to testing again this weekend. Testing is the only thing I do with CoD as it offers very little for single player. But a good tool for testing