Guys, there's no way you can get decent performance in P3D2 with max settings, no matter what your hardware. Autogen is much more dense for a given setting than FSX, and some of the new rendering options (shadows in general, terrain shadows in particular) are extremely demanding. The developers have explained over on the P3D forums that the settings are there to allow different kinds of users to tailor different kinds of scenarios, not to set everything to the right. In my case, running on a delidded, water-cooled 3770K overclocked to 4.8 GHz and a water-cooled 780ti, I run into trouble if I push autogen above normal (I'm experimenting with dense in 2.2 but no verdict yet) and I have to pick and choose among shadow options. I keep tessellation off as well, and I gained a lot by dropping my NVidia Inspector profiles and just running it in global default. It's an old saw but it applies here - if you're running into stutters, OOMs and other performance issues, try cheating some of your sliders back. Better still, tune performance by starting with sliders at full left, then increase them until you hit turbulence. I agree it's worth some tradeoffs for some of the new features, like the shadows and the HDR lighting - otherwise you've got something that looks like FSX, though much smoother - but caution will pay off. It's too bad, but them's still the breaks.