You need the patch 1.02 of FF7 to use an Nvidia card, tick the Tnt to disable the paletted textures check, so all tests will pass.
http://ffsf.aaron-kelley.net/patch.html

You also need a particular version of the Nvidia drivers. For me the version 81.85 works well in Windows XP. With version 307, FF7 is glitched, and with version 61 FF7 didn't work for me. There's still a minor visual glitch when you pause the game in a fight with drivers 81.85, there may be more drivers versions that work well or better. Most graphics cards had various glitches back then.

edit: with Windows XP you'll also need the chocobo fix, because the game crashes in chocobo races and the snowboard mini game, because the game tries to look at a wrong memory adress and Windows XP's memory works differently than Windows 9x.
https://www.moddb.com/games/final-fantasy-vii … s/chocobo-patch

chuky wrote on 2023-06-24, 16:57:

You need the patch 1.02 of FF7 to use an Nvidia card, tick the Tnt to disable the paletted textures check, so all tests will pas […]
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You need the patch 1.02 of FF7 to use an Nvidia card, tick the Tnt to disable the paletted textures check, so all tests will pass.
http://ffsf.aaron-kelley.net/patch.html

You also need a particular version of the Nvidia drivers. For me the version 81.85 works well in Windows XP. With version 307, FF7 is glitched, and with version 61 FF7 didn't work for me. There's still a minor visual glitch when you pause the game in a fight with drivers 81.85, there may be more drivers versions that work well or better. Most graphics cards had various glitches back then.

edit: with Windows XP you'll also need the chocobo fix, because the game crashes in chocobo races and the snowboard mini game, because the game tries to look at a wrong memory adress and Windows XP's memory works differently than Windows 9x.
https://www.moddb.com/games/final-fantasy-vii … s/chocobo-patch

Unfortunately windows xp drivers just did not want to install in windows 7 no matter what. Only vista drivers installed in windows 7 for some reason. I might have to give up on the idea of having that system have such secondary purpose for older games and have a specific older system for those.