Later drivers don't have hardware D3D support AFAIK so it's likely being rendered entirely by your CPU. For XP, I'd probably try a driver from 2001-2002.

Dig around on here
https://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/
https://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/win_2k/
https://ftp.matrox.com/pub/mga/archive/2kxp/

But GTA3 is really more of a Radeon / GeForce class game. G450 is a DirectX 6 card. Good for things from 1999 and older. OpenGL driver is a bit rough outside of Quake 1-3 and whatever pro apps it was meant for at the time.

It wasn't until 6.xx or so that 3D support was removed. The PCI G450 probably uses a bridge chip and so may have issues with high poly counts that the AGP version wouldn't.

Ah.

I guess I would experiment with some other games. Also, the readme for GTA3 mentions the display drivers must be D3D 8.1 compatible. I am not sure if G4xx ever went beyond D3D 7 compatibility. The driver release readmes aren't very helpful.

Thanks for the help guys. I've tried a few older versions and some older games, which don't even launch, reintalled DX 7, 8 and 9. None of this fixed the issue and the card didn't seem to support my monitor's native 1600 * 1200 resolution over DVI which it really should! So now I've given up and gone back to my x1950XT.

Could also be a motherboard compatibility issue, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft6eoyxT1ik.