X1000 has adaptive MSAA/SSAA mode which significantly improves quality of alpha-blended textures and 16-bit dithering overall.

You can make a compatibility list of adaptive AA in DX3-7 with these cards. I'd prefer 8x FSAA.

I don't have any of these games but I wonder if there is a driver or direct3d hack to limit the amount of video memory reported, to fix some of these buggy games without having to patch the games themselves.

Presumably you could simply write a DirectDraw wrapper that intercepts GetAvailableVidMem and/or GetCaps and fills in a more suitable VRAM count. But if this worked reliably you'd assume it'd be available already. Of course the idea in finding a compatible card is that you don't need wrappers and workarounds to begin with.

In the case of Thief the problem looks to be not VRAM size but how VRAM is managed. I'm guessing the game expects CreateSurface to result in an immediate VRAM allocation since that call is followed by GetAvailableVidMem and the game exiting with an error message if the amount of free VRAM hasn't gone down. Simply catching GetAvailableVidMem and forcing lpdwFree to report lpdwTotal subtracted by a byte for every surface created lets the game run.

Adaptive MSAA tested with the X1300. Compatibility not good. Texture seams and menu flicker in Die Hard Trilogy, texture seams and low quality fonts in Darkstone, texture seams in Homeworld. Ok in Monster Truck Madness 2.