Well, it is the topic of the thread.. as I said in my first post, game runs smooth apart from this one exception; a heavily smoking plane.
What I don't understand is that if I run the game at its lowest settings, surely this eliminates the possibilty of the vid card being thrashed.
I posted the 600x480 only because this was the lowest settings I tried out. I did indeed try ALL settings from this resolution up to 1280x1024 with AAx2, no AF and texture sizes of 128,256 and 512. No joy.