This morning - it being a absolutely foul day (rain- gales - typical English spring day) I started poking around in the depths of all my saved .exe files with a view to deleting those no longer needed and found I still had 3D Mark 2001SE saved . So, curious as to how it would see things I installed it on both my OS( I have dualboot WinME - seldom used, and WinXP on this PC - this is where FS9 is).I then ran the standard benchmark test.Surpise ,surprise----The winME system , still using the old 44.03 drivers installed ages ago scored 9000+ while the WinXP - using the latest 56.64 only made about 8200.Curious about this I d/loaded the old 44.03s for WinXP, created a sysrestore point in WinXP in case of problems, uninstalled 56.64 and put in 44.03. The result was a Benchmark score of 8900+--- BUT ,when running FS9 it was immediately obvious that the end result was not so good - the graphics not so clear and the clouds definately less good.In for a penny - in for a pound -- I systematically went thru the 45.63,52.16 and 56.55- varying results but none score in Benchmark as high as 44.03-- BUT again the impression when running FS9 is that things are not quite as good as 56.64 whatever the benchmark score may be.At the end I went back to the 56.64 on the basis that - whatever 3D 2001SE Benchmark may say - the later drivers give a better visual end result with little difference in overall fps(possibly slightly better ).System info belowAny opinions- comments-critisism ?DaveAMD Athlon 2000XP (@133/133)ECS K7S5A Mobo 3.1 :04/29/02 Rev BiosSiS 735 Chipset Rev 12 x 256mb DDR RAMGeforce4 Ti-4200-8x 128mb DDR AGPSIS AGP 1.17 WHQL . Nvidia56.64 Detonator XP Drivers(WinXP),44.03(WinME)2 x Maxtor 40GB HDD (7200rpm)LG 8x4x32 CDRWLG 52x CDRDirect X 9.0 Windows ME(FS2002)/ Windows XP dual boot(FS9)BIOS Settings- DRAM Timing Ultra. CAS Latency 3T,RAS ACtive 6T,RAS Precharge 3TL1 Cache Enabled.L2 Cache Enabled.Sys BIOS Cache Disabled.DRAM Drive Slew Rating - Fast

Yeh that seems to be the common thing with the earlier Nvidia drivers. I think those drivers are more compatible with DirectX8 which is what 3dmark2001 is, a directX8 benchmark tool. Later drivers seems to be more for DirectX9 compatibility which is why your scores have gone down. Mine have done too over the last few driver revisions. I get about 16900 marks with the latest drivers but the first lot of drivers I had for my card I it was abit more. My 3dmark03 scores have risen though.Same thing with my laptop. I was getting 9910 in 3dmark2001 with my first lot of drivers but it goes down a little bit with each driver revision.Craig

CraigYes - I sort of guessed it was a DX8/DX9 thing causing the change in scores. Whatever 3D2001 may say about the later drivers - the actual end result on the monitor certainly looks better with the later drivers( or at least - some of them- my setup didn't like the 53.xx ones very much).Dave

It's precisely what has been said time and again in many different FS forums - Flight Simulator 200x is it's own benchmark. Although the benchmarking might give you numbers, those numbers actually mean very little at FS bootup, othre than to give a vague indicator to the overall performance of the system.56.64 drivers also introduce some new `features` (or bugfixes, call them what you will). The mipmap slider within FS9 now makes an appreciable difference to what I see on screen - with no twinkling, and the menu AA switch now works quite well, I think.Another point which came up somewhere else is that these drivers really benefit from clean installation - removing all traces of previous drivers using one of the driver cleaning tools seems to pay dividends.Allcott