ok i have experimented fa lot and i have come up with some conclusions. the most important being the frame rates have almost nothing to do with my video card. the matrix application is just really poorly written. to improve my fps i did the following.
in nVidia ctrl panel, set everyting to what it should be to favor performance over quality -- except i can't handle no vsynch so i leave that and triple-buffering on. the matrix app seems to like "pre-rendered frames" to be at 2 for some reason -- at least for me.
after you run the matrix app and get to the loading area, ctrl-tab out and open up your task manager. go to oroceses and find the matrix.exe app. right-click it and select "Set Priority" then "Realtime" -- though if you don't have a multi-core or multi-processor system, this could be dangerous. then right-click the matrix.exe app again and select "Set Affinity". i change it so it doesn't use "CPU 0" but uses CPUs 1-3. it doesn't appear to be a multi-threaded app but giving it 3 processors and leaving the first one free for the system seems to help for me. it may just make me feel more in control, though, hehe.
and with that, when i first jack in, i get a gorgeous 60fps -- it looks surreal. then, of course, over time the engine gets bogged-down somehow and i end up going back to the way it used to be.
hope that helps someone...
dedic
PS thanks for the /netstats info, MUCH appreciated!