After upgrading my rig and purchasing a joystick and Active Camera I started to fly in vc view more often than before. That's when I found this problem. The analog gauge needle stutters like it's only updated a few time per second. It won't rotate smoothly, making it hard to read. When I change to 2d panel view, the problem's gone. It only happens in vc view. Mostly it happens in freeware addons, but also in some payware ones. CS C130 and Aerosoft A-10. I locked the sim's fps at 30, and it never goes lower than that. I could run pmdg 744 and rfp 742 just fine without any gauge stutter, so I think the problem lies within the addons themselves. Any idea what happens here and how to fix it? FYI, I've updated the fs9, my vga driver, and directX to the latest versions already. Thanks.

Check the panel.cfg of the aircraft that gives problems.
At the bottom you will see one or more sections for the vc panels.

What I have read in other fora is that FS will only handle one of these sections per frame.
So if you have 1 section it will take one frame to update all VC instruments but if you have 10 sections it will take 10 frames to do this.
(the sections for the 2d panels are all updated every frame)

These sections are closely related to how textures are placed over the vc's 3D model so you would need to edit that to change it.

As a workaround you could see if you can find another addon of the same plane that has a vc with smoother instruments and than use that addon's model.
This will also change the external model and textures.

Thanks for the info, Jeroen. I think you're right, I experimented with CS 707, which I forgot to mention is also suffers from stuttering. I kept only 1 vc section, copied all 109 vc gauges to section 1, resizing them to 0,0. When I tested the addon there was no stuttering. All flight instruments on the original section 1, which size I left as is, rotates smoothly, despite the fact that the vc still have the same 109 gauges as before. CS707 has 8 vc sections, so that means each gauge only has less than 4 fps update rate at 30 in game fps. No wonder.. Sadly my rig could only handle 60 fps even in unlimited setting, so I think the only solution is to get back to 2d panel, since finding replacement model and doing major modif to panel.cfg is beyond me..