Overall I am rather satisfied....
I'm not getting the amazing fps boost the dev team spoke of but it is certainly a lot more stable. I very rarely dip below 20fps anymore, which was a constant problem..... though it has to be said that was noticed more often than not whilst flying through or near clouds and, as the clouds are off, that may not show any actual improvement due to optimization.
I can use shadows now, which is a massive improvement, as well as my native resolution (1600x900) which, obviously, improves graphical display.
(Switching them off doesn't give as much of an fps boost as one would suspect so.... I'm happy to have them, if slightly underwhelmed by the supposed amazing "boost" that was lauded constantly leading up to the patch). - of course I have also noticed that a lot of ground shadows/ cloud shadowing is missing so I do suspect that this is not so much a case of optimization as omission.
The only real bugs I have come up against is the much reported red rectangle at the beginning (Not really something which bothers me) and the also reported dim sites in the 109..... turning up the illumination seems to make very little difference.
Overall: I am very happy as I can turn on more eye candy and the game is certainly more stable.
I am a tiny bit concerned that all these months of "optimization" seems to have involved turning off the troublesome features and sweeping them under the carpet.
REALLY GLAD that I am getting better performance and better visuals.
REALLY DISAPPOINTED that this "patch" isn't really much of a patch at all..... bit like replacing Crysis 2 with Crysis..... still a great game but of course it runs better when you turn off all the things that were supposed to make it great.
I am giving this patch a 7/10.
That said, of course I am majorly happy with it.... just not for the reasons I should have been.
EDIT Scrap what I wrote above. After further flying I am giving this patch -1 out of 10. This really is a joke and I would like to see some evidence that any work has actually been done on this game??? I am made all the more suspicious by the relatively small size of the patch... this is not the "Huge" patch we were promised and, from what I can see, all the dev team have actually done is take stuff out thus leading to a small improvement in performance.... at first... and then the performance degrades and along come the CTDs. I honestly don't actually believe anything has been done to fix this game and it has all been smoke and mirrors. I hope I am wrong but all evidence seems to point to me being totally right. To say I am disgusted is an understatement! To think..... I actually loved this game warts and all... now? I'm not even sure I can be bothered anymore.