VOGONS


First post, by Devil996

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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?

Reply 1 of 7, by Joseph_Joestar

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Devil996 wrote on 2026-03-23, 17:07:

Do you have any suggestions?

Get a cheap GeForce 2 MX400 and use 12.41 drivers. Don't forget to install the official 1.2 GeForce patch for FF8, and you should be good to go.

Also, don't use AI slop for retro questions, it will just hallucinate nonsense. No Radeon card can render this game correctly.

My retro builds

Reply 2 of 7, by Devil996

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-03-23, 21:29:
Devil996 wrote on 2026-03-23, 17:07:

Do you have any suggestions?

Get a cheap GeForce 2 MX400 and use 12.41 drivers. Don't forget to install the official 1.2 GeForce patch for FF8, and you should be good to go.

Also, don't use AI slop for retro questions, it will just hallucinate nonsense. No Radeon card can render this game correctly.

I have that card! I'll try it and let you know!

Reply 3 of 7, by Devil996

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Joseph_Joestar wrote on 2026-03-23, 21:29:
Devil996 wrote on 2026-03-23, 17:07:

Do you have any suggestions?

Get a cheap GeForce 2 MX400 and use 12.41 drivers. Don't forget to install the official 1.2 GeForce patch for FF8, and you should be good to go.

Also, don't use AI slop for retro questions, it will just hallucinate nonsense. No Radeon card can render this game correctly.

You were right, Joseph, it was simpler than expected, but some events in the past got messed up, and I had some bad habits I didn't know I had. Your simple and direct answer made me doubt what I thought was certain, and I discovered that the Final Fantasy 8 patch I was applying wasn't in the same language as the game. Now, with the correct patch, I suddenly have no more problems, from my GeForce 2 GTS to my FX5700LE. Thanks for solving this problem after 26 years.

Reply 4 of 7, by zapbuzz

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cool I was preparing to run FF8 I guess its on steam but its censored (Final Fantasy VIII Remastered 2019) 🤣
found all the patches glad I saw this thread before jumping in
be interesting to see how it plays on my Nvidia GeForce 4 MX440 128mb
got latest driver now.
Have just copied the game discs with alcohol 120% because cd's are really noisy.

Reply 5 of 7, by zapbuzz

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Works great on my p4 3.4Ghz Northwood PC recommend.
I'm playing on Windows Millennium with 756mb ram.
I got it working without the CD's and the gameplay is awesome - no noises or slight pauses with the CDROM anymore.
Also I remember I used to play it on PS1 even that wasn't quite as good as this! (PS1 had slight pauses / lag changing screens)
I actually have the 2019 release on steam so I compared them and this original PC version is better with no slight pauses or lag but the music wow much better than the steam version I'll thank Yamaha XG for that. (to shame on 2019 release devs for emulating PS1 glitches makes my Haswell system look like a Pentium III or PS1)
It's a pity final fantasy games went online only we can't really sell those to new users get some money back to put towards new releases.
They say we never owned our games anyway 🙁

Last edited by zapbuzz on 2026-03-25, 09:42. Edited 7 times in total.

Reply 6 of 7, by leileilol

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i hear trident blade3d chipsets/cards are okay for ff7/8

apsosig.png
long live PCem
FUCK "AI"

Reply 7 of 7, by Devil996

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leileilol wrote on Today, 03:52:

i hear trident blade3d chipsets/cards are okay for ff7/8

It probably has no problems on FF7, but on FF8 it will have insufficient performance.