Hi people, is there anyone with experience of using PCI cards who could answer any of my previous questions? Also:Q5) Whats a good PCI card? I saw this XFX card http://www.xfxforce.com/web/product/listCo...=110#PV-T64K-UABut I'm not sure if it's worth it (e.g. is there much point having 256MB memory if the memory interface is 128MB?).

You are right, that running the right and left monitors in the VC mode (which show views of the outside scenery through the windows of the cockpit) really slows framerate.One fix is to use the 2d cockpit views in those monitors instead. Move the undocked views from the center monitor to the right and left ones. Select the "cockpit" views (not VC views), stretch them to fit both screens, choose the magnification to match that in the center monitor (e.g. 84%), and finally use the hat switch to pan those views so that they start where the right and left edges of the view on the center monitor ended. When you taxi or fly, you will now see wrap around scenery (albeit with only the instrument panel in the center monitor)....and framerate will be much improved.Mike

OMG, years of playing First Person Shooters and overclocking finally pays off, there's ONE QUESTION I can actually answer!!!The reason why resolution isn't killing your framerates is because the bottleneck for MOST Flight Sim FPS issues is not your graphics card but your CPU. Pop open your Task Manager and check CPU usage sometime in the middle of a flight. If you are like me, and fly with full traffic, SpeechBuddy, FSNav, ActiveCamera and ActiveSky, then you will find yourself at 100 percent CPU utilization during your entire flight (and this on my 3.2). Note, this won't actually show up as 100% unless you have hyperthreading turned off, but I get zero difference in performance on or off.Your CPU is what's calculating polygons, determining what textures to send, doing all the flight calculations, managing traffic, etc. etc. Your graphics card is just rendering the polygons and performing FSAA/AF. Because your frame rate is being choked by the CPU, MOST good graphics cards on the market won't be all that taxed doing the math, hence you have to go to some pretty serious resolutions and maxed AA/AF to see frame rate hits from your card. This is also true of most games, the big difference is that, for whatever reason, games like Doom3 or UT2K4 don't have nearly the CPU demands that FS9 has.ALl this asside, I have yet to be able to figure out why it takes SOOOooo long for texture updates in FS9 - the blurries as we all know it. My fondest hope for FSX is that they lick this problem. A final question: I have two old PCI video cards - one's an old Diamond TNT M64, and no matter what I do, I can't get Windows XP to accept a driver for it... Anyone have any luck or is the card just so old it's hopeless.

Have you tried driver heaven for a video driver? I got one from there for my Diamond Riva128, which is an even older card than yours.Gary