2 years ago i got a pny card with a nvidea chipset , it had 1gb of ram it had its on cpu onboard
Yes, to begin with the graphics boys made their products more capable; presumably to sell to people with lower end and older equipment. Now there seems to be a lot more true integration, and the CPU makers are pushing more work the way of the GPU?

But was it a PCI card?
I doubt it.........AGP dates back to the late 1990's and PCI-e to 2004.

Also, back then, Blue Ray was pretty much home entertainment video, so the requirements were somewhat different?

At any rate, I've decided that I'm just going to upgrade the system. I don't care to try my luck with another PCI video card. There's just too many good known-to-work-well PCIe cards out there. Besides, a 2.0GHz Pentium w/ 1GB RAM just doesn't "get it" in the gaming world today.
I would totally agree with that. The basic specs of that Sony box are office, or entry level home entertainment. Even if you managed to find a PCI card, I bet all you would do is move the bottleneck somewhere else

I think that your last statement is very appropriate! Although FSX is a very old game, it is old in the sense of "long-running", as it has had many upgrades over the years (I can remember it from Windows 3.x days ).

If the worst comes to the worst, I can always send your stepdad my only venture into flight simulators (apart from the blow all aliens to hell shoot-em-ups). My wife actually managed to take the plane off, fly it round the airfield and land it (on the runway)! she wasn't best pleased when I showed her it had automatic take off and landing, and pointed out that the Russian air-force do not normally take off on full re-heat

It is the commercially repackaged version of the flight sim for the Su27 air superiority fighter. What they don't tell you is it would be a great help if you:

1. Were a pilot
2. Had a degree in aeronautical engineering
3. Had fluent written and spoken Russian.

Cheers