FF7 and FF8 have community made graphic subsystem replacements that are a mixed bag in this regard.

I've personally had good experiences with the opengl renderer, but not everyone does.

https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14922.0

I dont think this is the latest version of the driver in question. I have fuzzy memories of it becoming a github hosted project with newer releases.

Back up your current install before mucking about.

The issue in question comes from lack of palletized texture support from your video hardware/driver, and the game not having a good way to deal with that. The community made renderer handles this 'acceptably', imo. Again, not everyone agrees.

wierd_w wrote on 2026-02-02, 16:11:

FF7 and FF8 have community made graphic subsystem replacements that are a mixed bag in this regard. […]
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FF7 and FF8 have community made graphic subsystem replacements that are a mixed bag in this regard.

I've personally had good experiences with the opengl renderer, but not everyone does.

https://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=14922.0

I dont think this is the latest version of the driver in question. I have fuzzy memories of it becoming a github hosted project with newer releases.

Back up your current install before mucking about.

The issue in question comes from lack of palletized texture support from your video hardware/driver, and the game not having a good way to deal with that. The community made renderer handles this 'acceptably', imo. Again, not everyone agrees.

Not work under win98.... 🙁

Sorry to hear it.

You need a video card / gpu driver that supports 8bit palletted textures.

This is the period in time where that support started disappearing.

I'm not sure about when the support for 8-bit palette textures disappeared for nVidia, but AFAIK 6 (and maybe 7 series also) do have support for it. Back then I was able to play FF8 out-of-box with at least a GeForce 6200 AGP.

I remember having used a FF8 launcher program that can help with resolutions, fixing 8-bit palette textures, as well as loading other modifications (like patching the stat/damage cap to 32767), but I couldn't find it anymore after this many years. It's been at least a decade since I last played and completed it...

According to my notes: Geforce 256-Geforce FX series cards have paletted texture support, Geforce 6000 series and later do not. Driver 12.41 or newer required. Rendering errors (horizontal lines) on GeForce cards, patch available: Re: Table Fog & 8-bit Paletted Textures

Riva TNT/TNT2 don't have the corrupted graphics issue, but also no paletted textures support. It might have been because I was using a driver older than 12.41, but I'm not sure if the newer driver would fix it.

3dfx Voodoo, S3 Savage and older ATI cards (up to Rage XL) are also reported to work flawlessly.

I don't know exactly what the problem is, but it's not strictly related to 8-bit textures, or at least not exclusively. I have several older NVIDIA GPUs, and they all support 8-bit textures. I have a GeForce 2 GTS, an MX440SE, an FX5600, a TNT2 M64, a GeForce 2 MX 400... They all behave the same. The TNT2 M64 is the only one that doesn't support 8-bit textures. I've never solved it, and it seems there's no way... The patches I've found haven't helped at all, sometimes they break the game.

If it's not related to paletted textures and the official geforce patch doesn't help, then perhaps it's driver related? At that time nvidia drivers did vary quite a bit in their behavior.