I've seen similar texture loading in batches (gradually going from low detail or even completely missing textures to high detail) when flying FSX at very high detail settings with 3rd party scenery add-ons on a friend's PC, that's how i identified it as the main culprit for stutters and low FPS and reduced my texture size appropriately.
I think that it's a two-pronged deal here. It might be possible to further optimize the texture loading system and if/when we get a 64 bit executable have it utilize more RAM, swapping textures between RAM and GPU instead of hard disk and GPU and alllowing us to run higher texture sizes. It might also be possible to optimize texture size in bytes without compromising quality but this is a more long term work.
In the meantime, dropping textures from original to high or medium resolves a lot of problems and results in smooth gameplay, at least for people not using dual GPU setups.
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