Lowering texture quality is what i've been telling people that had problems getting steady FPS to try all along.
The amount of VRAM used by the sim as tested by other users and the way some textures loaded incrementally (first the low detail LODs, then the medium ones and then the high ones) in the initial versions of CoD, causing glitches similar to those i've seen on FSX on a friend's PC when he would set his graphics too high, convinced me that there's just not enough VRAM to load everything and it has to be swapped in and out of VRAM.
So, when we got the ability to use reduced resolution textures in one of the patches it was the first thing i did and the sim has been perfectly playable ever since on my two year old hardware.
As for looking ugly, the only issue is that some of the stencils on aircraft and cockpits have text that's a bit blurry some times. The landscape is looking good enough and to be honest, i've found out that setting textures to medium and land shading to high looks better and runs faster than doing it the opposite way (original size textures and setting land shading to low).
In any case, glad it's working out for you guys
