I didn't have time to test it thoroughly yet, but it's a big improvement on my rig.
I use an i7 920 at stock clock speeds (2.7 Ghz), Asus P6T deluxe motherboard, 3 GB of DDR3 RAM in triple channel and an Ati 4890 1GB graphics card, running win7 pro x64.
My resolution is 1680x1050. Before the patch i was running most settings in the medium-low spectrum. With the beta patch i turned off SSAO and reduced textures from original to high or medium, kept model and damage decals at high, but i also increased land shadows, forests, building amount and building draw distance from low to medium (grass, cockpit shadows and roads are on just like before the pach).
So, i effectively reduced my texture resolution for the scenery and turned off SSAO while increasing other settings. I tried two scenarios to test the load on my system and the results were significantly increased frame rates. Mind you i don't run with the FPS display on, i just go by eye and feel and see if it feels smooth to me or not. Well, it was noticeably smoother, much more stable and fluid.
For the "heavy load" scenario i tried the London sightseeing quick mission first and while i did get some pauses when new batches of buildings were being rendered (but not on every single instance like before), i could actually fly, navigate and maneuver the aircraft to a degree that allowed me to do aerobatics and pass under the Tower bridge without trouble.
Then i tried some dogfights over water, because i wanted to judge how it behaves when rendering aircraft, as i was getting stutters even over water when getting close to bombers or using the zoom view. I ran a few bomber intercept missions against dorniers with a total of 15 aircraft in the air and the results were excellent. Apart from the initial caching/loading, everything is smooth as silk.
The caching also happened pre-patch but it took 1-2 minutes to sort out and i would still get the occasional stutter and overall lower and less consistent frame rates. With the new patch it seems like it's scheduling things in a much more efficient manner. I can still perceive the odd pause here and there, but now the FPS is high and consistent enough that i can execute a head-on pass, aim, attack and evade the on-coming collision whereas pre-patch i would get a 1-2 second pause if i did this upon spawning in the mission and it would usually end in a collision.
I expect that when fighting over land things will be somewhere in-between these two scenarios and since i can turn down a couple of settings back to low i'm confident i'll probably maintain playable FPS all around. Also, a big source of stutters pre-patch was changes in what was being rendered on screen...when using head tracking i would get a very noticeable increase in stutters due to the view changing fast. This is now almost completely eliminated and has enabled me to really enjoy the test sorties i've flown today.
There's still obviously stuff to do to make it even better, but overall this patch has been a tremendous improvement for me and took the sim from semi-playable under specific conditions to definitely playable under most reasonable scenarios on my rig.
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