In one of the stutters the can be recreated offline, when you move in behind a drone and cross from the 600 yard view to the 400 yard view, there's a stutter - hard drive access and the vid mem used jumps from 16.9 to 17.3 (800x600). I assume it because the program is loading the plane skin.
I wonder if the reason two people with identical systems having different performance, may have to do with the fact their hard drives aren't equal,i.e., the hard drives have different seek rates.