I see the same thing and still get stutters and pauses. It makes attacking buffs very difficult because right as you get into range where he can start shooting you and you need to be shooting him, the screen makes either several short pauses or a big long pause, and it's worse if there are multiple bombers.
I dove on a buff formation from 2000 yards and right around 1000 yards when it was time to start hurling in cannon shells, the screen froze 7 or more times. When it unfroze, I was already well past the buffs and had no chance whatsoever to even open fire.
I've tried moving the texture load slider around but it has not helped at all.