Well this definitely ties in with my initial tests pointing to something network related when I changed the online players setting.
Thank you all for your replies and suggestions.
I’ll try to find some time to test that myself soon but real life is very much getting in the way right now 
Thanks again.
Hey. Whaddaya know. Tonight gave me a little chance to test. Turned back on Live Players and flipped my NIC settings to Public Profile.
And… I’m impressed! It certainly seems to have done the trick right now! I’m not counting my chickens just yet, but I certainly won’t be flipping it back to Private until something changes 
Thank you @DocterCheat - almost stutter-free flight and with my reasonably conservative settings, pretty smooth too.
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Do the GPU drops coincide with huge CPU spikes?
The GPU usage drops aren’t causing the stutter. They’re a symptom of it. For whatever reason, the main thread (or I guess it could be the render thread, but most likely its the main thread. The FPS display from the developer mode will tell you which one it is) is briefly locking up which causes it to stop producing frames to be sent to the GPU for processing. The GPU sits idle during these periods because it has nothing to do, and this shows up on your graph as a drop in usage. Chances are you’d find CPU usage spikes (on at least one core) that line up with the GPU usage drops.
Yes this is my suspicion too. I usually monitor the CPU and see these occasional huge spikes causing stutters. Weird thing is that it happens only during some sessions, but seemingly indepent of plane, scenery, weather, server or any other identifiable variables.
Was really hoping this was gonna be fixed with SU15 but that’s not the case
Just reading one of the other threads about 32GB/64GB RAM usage and wondering if the spike drops we’re seeing are due to virtual memory usage (i.e. paging)? I’m running 32GB RAM in my rig with a 4090… I’ve never seen my PC use more than 15GB reported by Task Manager though 