With all of the ATI 9xxx series, ATI introduced a very old bug in the newer drivers which causes many elements of Aces High to appear black (radar dots, horizon...).
Some of the newer cards from ATI, which still use the older GPU also have the same bug. The ATIX3xx series is one of them, if I recall.
NVidia stopped optimizing thier drivers for the FX5xxx, and older cards, back in version 61.77. Any driver later than that for the earlier cards will cause stutters, freezes, lockups, and generally poor performance overall. 61.77 is the best driver version for those cards.
It also seems NVidia has introduced some bugs in a couple of its later releases for the FX6xxx series. They seem to come and go, so it is a 'hit and miss' proposition right now.
Both companies select the top ten , or so, box games (and benchmarks) to optimize for. Sometimes these optimizations have a negative impact on, not only Aces High, but other games as well.