I'm trying to fix a problem I've had for 26 years with Final Fantasy 7 and 8. They don't run properly. When I brought home my 700MHz Athlon with a GeForce 2 GTS, I couldn't wait to install Final Fantasy 8 and finish it for the second or third time. Imagine my face when I found myself with a streaky screen. "They'll fix it," I thought... Poor fool. It's never worked well. Now it's time for a change. I've bought 20 graphics cards, and only one works well, but it's a little underperforming. Here's my experience:
The hardest game is FF8; it's the most annoying. Either the 8-bit textures don't run, or it corrupts the backgrounds, or both. Sometimes it won't even start. Strange, they should have learned from FF7, but instead they made things worse.

Voodoo: ahahahahahahahahahhahaha I'm not rich. These are the cards the game is written for (poorly). I'm sure it will work on these, though not all will perform well on FF8.

nVidia: The TNT doesn't support 8-bit textures, the GeForce cards corrupt the backgrounds in Final Fantasy 8, and they don't look great in Final Fantasy 7. I have 4-5, from the GTS, to the GF4 MX, to the FX 5600, to the FX 5700, and nothing works well with FF8.

ATI: The Rage 128 with drivers 4.13.710 and 4.13.7192 runs Final Fantasy 7 almost perfectly, as long as you manually enable 8-bit textures in the driver, which are disabled by default. There are minimal and negligible glitches. The Mach64 LT does too, but performance is acceptable with FF7 and insufficient with FF8. Radeon 9000 nada de nada.

Matrox G400: I love the build quality of this card, and I love the clarity of its VGA signal. But it doesn't support 8-bit textures, and even activating the option with the PowerStrip doesn't work.

According to the AI, a 7500 or lower might be right for me.

Do you have any suggestions?