Sorry for the late response, shopping for a new psu since mine is a piece of....not so good one, was a budget decision at the time.
Driver 270.xx whql, so far my favorite, the ones after that imo gave me less performance, still have to try the new beta driver though.
Settings:
1600x900 60hz (native monitor res is 1920x1080, I do not get any better fps if I lower the resolution more)
full screen
1xAA (looks better than 2xAA and up currently)
ssao on (cannot notice any fps increase without it)
anti epilepsy filter off
model detail high
building detail medium
land detail medium
forests medium
visual effects medium
texture quality original
damage decals medium
building amount medium
land shading medium
grass, shadows, roads on
vsync off in game, force on in nvidia cp (launcher.exe)
in nvidia cp
default quality settings exept:
prefer maximum performance
AA enhance application
prerendered frames 8
I am very sure that land detail and forests determine draw distance, maybe building detail as well.
One of the moderators, Blackdog, set things with a different approach, i.e. setting one parameter of the same things low so he can raise the other.
For example land detail low, land shading high.
It took me a while to get settled with these settings, been trying and testing more than actually playing. The biggest performance hit comes definitely from clouds ( clouds and grahics are still not the final version so with patches improvements can be expected ).
The thing is clouds are a realism option since they actually influence your aircraft when you fly through them (aircraft performance decrease, at least for me, the gauges go nuts unless you turn on the pitot heater if your aircraft has one and of course much lowered visibility), so I really want to have them on even though they cut my fps in half...ish.
Try turning clouds off and see if maybe that helps with the stutters.
If you searched for "ram drive ataros" and you came across the suggested procedure then you may have noticed that it looks like a pain to implement it, I luckyly didn't have to do it, but it still might be worth the effort. I went through something similar with another game and the solution involved installing a second HDD and then making a symbolic link for files to be written onto that HDD......and it worked like a charm.
Let me know if things go better for you in flight, good luck
