hello, it's been a long time since I last visited the forum!, but today I'm going to post because I think I found a solution to a problem.

I have a voodoo 3 card 16mb, and the game need for speed hot pursuit 2,
always had the problem that the cars either look white without textures if you set the details to something higher than the minimum, OR, something I find ridiculous: if you set the car details to the minimum, you can see the car textured and colored, BUT THE WHEELS ARE WHITE TEXTURE-LESS!!.
hahahaha.
(note, all the nfs games since 1 up to porsche unleashed work perfectly with v3).
some time ago, I tryed the mikepedo drivers (they are supposed to add 512x512 textures support to direct3d), but there was no effet.
I tryed official 1.07 and amigamerlin 2.9 on 9x, and amigasport 3.0 and  sfft 1.x on 2k/xp, and I had no luck.
I tryed with different directx versions, 8, 8.1, 9 and 9.0c, and I always got the same ridiculous problem "the wheels are white and missing the textures", or "if I set the car details higher, the whole cars get textureless", and it's a shame that the game uses direct3d instead of opengl because it would have been easier to get it fixed using mesa,
(a wrapper didn't work). anway, I accepted it as "it's impossible, I'll let it go", until today, with brings me to another problem and a little more background:

I was trying to run "house of the dead 3", without any luck, on 9x (with amigamerlin 2.9) drivers, with the lowest possible settings (640x480, either fullscreen or windowed, 16 bits, low texture quality),
it gets to the sega screen and then...hangs. nothing more happens.
and on xp I hear the sounds, I can even start the game, but the screen remains black!.
I tryed every thing I could think of, tweaking the properties of the card, trying (again) a d3d to opengl wrapper, 3danalize, different drivers, a thing that's supposed to be a "nvidia emulator" but as far as I can tell, had absolutely no effect on anything. (and I personally hate nvidia so it was not very funny for me to try that thing, it's insulting for a voodoo card to emualte nvidia :) ) and here comes the funny part:

while I was testing 3dfx official drivers 1.03 on 9x, I remembered the hot pursuit 2 problem and I decided to try it and....

CHARARARA RA RA REEROREEEE!! (final fantasy end of battle trumpet :) )

THE CARS LOOK FINE AND TEXTURED AND THE WHEELS LOOK BLACK AND TEXTURED AND THE DETAILS SETTING DOESN'T MATTER, I THINK THE CARS ARE DISPLAYED AS THEY ARE SUPPOSED TO, YOU GET THE TEXTURES, THE DIFFERENT PAINTINGS OR WHATEVER, THE WHEELS, EVERYTHING IS THERE!.
the details settings has its intented effect, if you set it to the minimum, you se a very undetailed card, painted but without "extra stuff", but if you set it higher, you see it detailed AND YOU DON'T LOSE THE TEXTURES ON THE WHEELS!!!.

does it mean the 1.03 drivers support textures higher than 256x256 on direct3d???.

he, now I'm going to try every problematic game again.

the bad part is that house of the dead didn't work anyway, the same thing happened: it got to the sega screen and hanged.

so, to keep this short:

i)with 3dfx 1.03 drivers you get to see the cars and/or the wheels textured in nfs hp 2 (it was absurd to think that a v3 card was not capable of displaying a stupid car wheel)

ii) IS THERE ANY WAY TO PLAY HOUSE OF THE DEAD 3 ON A VOODOO 3 16MB CARD?.
I'm like "come on, the card can run things a lot more complex than a rail shooter, games like return to castle wolfestein and jedi academy are a lot more demanding and the card runs them fine... this is as ridiculous as the untextured wheels problem".

(by the way, hotd 1 and 2 work fine).

ps: my current specs:

pentium 3 666mhz 256mb ram, intel 815-something chipset (I don't remember), with reminds me that the crappy onboard intel graphics adaptor, has the same problem with house of the dead 3.
even using the latest drivers.
by the way, the onboard card opengl support is non-existant, I think it's even more basic than my monster 3d 4mb opengl support, and the direct3d support at least works....mostly....with some games... but it looks horrible, and it's slow as hell and games that work perfectly with the v3, go CRRRR CRRRRRR CRRRRR with the onboard thing.
so, using that card, is not an option.

That's some good Info, thanks for the summary :)

The only detail that made the Win9x 1.03.00 Drivers somewhat different was after it was discovered that GTA3 would run on intel based Systems, where all other Drivers failed.

Leads me to assume that this Driver just does something different, which in this case helps certain games. Unfortunately we'll probably never find out which difference it is.

I remember, however, that there was at least one 3dfx official Win9x Driver which supported upto 2048x2048 Textures (means it accepted them). Loading Textures took a long time but while loading they were auto-compressed and filtered into 256x256, which actually looked quite good (a 1024x768 Desktop turned into a Texture was still readable).
Not sure of course, but it might have been this detail that helps some games (I could be wrong however).