A chat over on Beyond3D got me curious about just which Radeon cards can run the game's bump mapping. The game uses D3D8 bump mapping that is broken on modern Radeons. It might be broken on modern GeForce cards as well.

Anyway, the bump mapping works fine on any D3D9 Radeon with drivers up to the last Cat 10.2 set. I plugged in a X1950XTX and the game ran great. On a Radeon HD however you can not go beyond Cat 7.12. I tried several later versions and all crash in the same manner. So in other words you can't go beyond a Radeon HD 3870 because that's the newest card supported by 7.12.

Also, the Steam version of the game has been altered in some way to "improve" compatibility of the bump mapping (but it still doesn't work). Apparently these tweaks have also messed up the bump maps to some extent. Best to play the CD version.