I would recommend using an era appropriate ATI or using nVidia -- they have always (and still) seem to have better backwards compatibility than ATI.

Unfortunatly, I don’t think there’s an option to play it with an ATI card. Just get a cheap GeForce 2 MX and you’re good to go.

What about Glide? I am pretty sure I played it accelerated with V2.

ff7 didn't use glide

It could be FF8 then. But I really remember playing FF7 accelerated in black-bordered fullscreen...

The FF7 demo supported glide -- that was all.

Get your self a Voodoo 😉

Yeah, get yourself an expensive video card (such as a Voodoo 2 / 3), so you can play a game that runs perfectly on a $5 video card 😀

If I'm not mistaken, FFVII needed support for palleted textures, and Ati cards simply don't have that.

Any Nvidia card from that era should work fine though, so I second the GeForce2 MX recommendation.

I still have the trapezoid boxed version of FFVII that I pre-ordered. The box has the 3dfx logo on it. I played it on whatever 3dfx card I had at the time it was released.

Here is the text from the FF7ReadMe.txt about original video card support:

1VIDEO CARDS
2
3Supported 3D Accelerator Video Cards
4Final Fantasy VII currently supports 3D accelerator video cards that 
5pass the criteria contained in the FF7 Configuration graphic card test.
6At release time, the game supports the cards that contain any of the 
7following chipsets:
83Dfx Voodoo
93Dfx Voodoo2
103Dfx Voodoo Rush
113Dlabs Permedia2
12ATI Rage Pro
13Intel I740
14
15In addition, the game will support the following chipsets when they 
16ship later this year:
17Matrox G200
18NEC PowerVR2

The D3D patch did not come out till later.

Edit:
If you want to play it well without an officially supported video card, then you probably want to get the unofficial patch stuff and set it up in XP. I remember it being a super pain to get working, but once you do get it working it works just fine for the most part.

Thank you. I was thinking my memory is playing tricks on me.

FF7 is d3d + software. The glide API isn't supported in this game.
The unpatched version of FF7 needs palettized textures for the d3d mode. The patch "workarounds" this requirement and the game works with all d3d videocards.

I put my old Geforce 4 MX 440 in my 98 machine and poof, works out of the box. Thanks for the help, everyone!