It's not just early games. Once you get another core there's another layer of issues, even DX9 games can get problematic.
'Upgrading' FF7's 'graphics' would be the last thing i'd want to do to get a game working. I gave up and play it on a Win9x machine with the ficedultra patch installed though (just psf music, nothing else changed). There's supposed to be a freeze around the Chocobo Racing bit on XP btw and I know a lot people play FF7 for the Golden Saucer....
Don't forget that FF7 is problematic on Windows in general, not just XP. It was an infamously unstable piece of work at the time, but since it was a game that made their Voodoo2s feel like they're worth their money (unlike say MEGAMAN X4 or anything else blitting 2d 🤣) it got a free pass on all the bugs it had, like Bethesda post '02
Also the only reason why early OpenGL games crash is because of the extension lists being excessive - since 2000, Nvidia loved to overadvertise them. You can get around it by the obscure option in the driver to limit the extensions, but this also happens on ATI as of late too... and they don't give you a choice. You can also use a D3D wrapper to limit in case your game isn't open source and fixed