That's the Bethesda Xngine and yeah it was demanding and buggy. Their in-house original full 3D DOS engine. Most late 90s 3D games run a lot better on hardware from 2000-2001. Even high resolution DOS games. Feed it with something >1 GHz. I don't know if Redguard is limited to Voodoo1 but if a Voodoo2 or 3 can be made to work that would help a ton too. Or possibly DGVoodoo1 DOS Glide wrapper.

They backed 3DFX instead of NVidia and it went very badly for them, as they dropped support for the game not soon after release. Anyway, a Unity conversion - based on work done for Daggerfall - is underway and could be good to go in a year or so. Before that happens, you'll need a Glide wrapper to do the dirty work of graphics.

RetroGamer4Ever wrote on 2026-07-21, 17:57:

They backed 3DFX instead of NVidia and it went very badly for them,

what? nvidia didn't have any DOS 3d API. Bethesda Softworks were still DOS developers in 98

XnGine in particular has some bizzare self-modifying code that REALLY doesn't like PCem and also can cause things to foul up in DOSBox's own dynrec.

I don't know what "real hardware" you're trying to run Redguard on but you're going to need a fast SVGA card and probably a Pentium II 333 MHz.

My specs:

AMD Duron - can't remember the exact model and mhz (the PC is in my hometown atm), I thought it's 1.4Ghz but I think it's actually a bit slower
256MB RAM
Radeon 9200se
Gigabyte GA-7ZM
Windows 98se

I first played it on modern laptop with dosbox and nglide and it was a slow mess. Then I tried it on this hardware and it's still slow lmao. But at least haven't had a single crash (it loves to block my sound card though) so that's a plus.