So, i renamed the video file containing the animation of the Ubi logo and had a go late last night. I didn't have time to do in-depth tests, just a quick go in the low altitude bomber intercept mission.
Long story short, i can't really verify it but it seems to work.
To be more precise, when i alt-tab out of the sim to check what CCC says my clock speeds are, it shows it's underclocked to 240Mhz. However, when in the sim it's noticeably smoother than before.
My suspicion is that getting rid of the logo lets the drivers recognize there's a game running and from that point on, it dynamically throttles the GPU up/down as needed, clocking up when in-game and undeclocking it back down once i alt-tab to the desktop.
I mean, i do get the 240Mhz indication in the CCC when i alt-tab out of CoD, but when actually flying i was getting an average of 24FPS with a maximum of 50 (as displayed by the in-game fps counter). I think it was also a bit misleading as i ran the mission for just one or two passes and that included the initial merge where all the textures load, so the sample range was a bit "biased" to the low side. If i had played through it for 10 minutes or so i guess the average would be around 30-35 FPS as it certainly hovered around 30-40 FPS for the remainder of the mission with maximum in the 50s, compared to 25FPS with a maximum of 30+ before renaming the video file.
This is still lower than what i got by forcing 850Mhz via the Ati tray tools (that gave me an almost constant 40 FPS all the way into the high 50s), but it's still a perfectly working solution.
The biggest improvement was that it completely eliminated the stutters that used to happen as the textures loaded the first time i would approach bombers or go to zoom view.
Until the sim is further optimized, this temporary workaround gets a thumbs up from me. Just remember to go back and rename the video file again after each patch or whenever you verify the integrity of the game files via Steam, because it will revert it to its default state.
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