S!
Confirmed after a lot of testing. The new ground textures only show within a "square" around your plane. Outside that textures are a lot lighter or even sand colored. This square is the same area where you can see the shimmering "edge", most easily spotted on sea.
Add to this the spherical area around your plane where the LODs change to more precise, most notably seen on trees but at altitude you can see it as well on houses appearing. Before they popped up so this smooth transition is better. This LOD sphere is what causes most of stutter to me, especially with shadows on as some of shadows do not even appear even they are inside this LOD sphere or they turn to a more detailed, less shimmering one inside it.
SSAO causes stutter and loss of FPS so not using it even there is a slight improvement in IQ with it on. Grass and shadows are also stutter sources along with the trees. With the trees you can also note the "LOD sphere" when at low level. The trees outside this area look a lot like the ones in original IL-2.
So IMHO there is a lot to do with the graphics engine to be able to really make the sim shine. Now it requires too much fiddling and tweaking to get it to run with enjoyable FPS. For me that is a solid 60FPS at any given situation. Currently CoD has these 6FPS dips that make the stutter and longer stops with effects/AI etc. nearby.
Anyways..state of sim much better than at release
