Does 32bit color only work in DirectX? because it doesn't seem to be working in 3DFX for me after selecting it.

It's automatically used with 3DFX (nGlide) according to nGlide page and I think a few people have mentioned it in a forums, even if it's not checked in-game.

ah thanks for the info

If you choose 3DFX renderer, it should not be possible to choose 32bit rendering, because GLIDE did not support it, it was a big limitation to this technology. The image is in fact rendered in 32bit thanks to nglide, the game itself is not aware of this.

As others have said yes, only in Direct mode. You should be able to switch to it easily enough.

Yep the Glide cards at the time the game was released didn't have 32bit modes, only 16 bit.

The only Glide cards to offer 32bit color depth was the Voodoo5. I don't know if this game could detect voodoo 5 and allow the switch to 32 bit mode.

I'm not sure if any of the current wrappers even emulate Voodoo5. Some have limited Voodoo 3 modes (don't remember the difference over older Voodoo cards except maybe extra memory and speed?). Keep in mind that not playing 3dfx, you lose several graphical special effects in the game that Unreal engine glide support allowed for.

Once again, if you use nglide wrapper and 3dfx renderer, the image IS rendered in 32bit color mode, despite the fact that the original 3dfx hardware was incapable of doing so.

That's true, its forcing it through other means.

But I'm still rather curious how this game would detect a Voodoo 5. Would it see it as a 32-bit card, and allow manual switch to 32-bit in the options menu?

Is there a reason why no one has made a specific Voodoo 5 api wrapper? Or would the emulation be very slow on current computers?

On a real V5 5500, the driver has an option that lets you force 32 bit rendering. Maybe nGlide does the same thing? This works for pretty much all glide games that run in Windows. Performance also goes down because it's more demanding of course.

Ahh the V5 5500, that was one of my favorite cards of all time. I still miss voodoo!

At least now things are pretty much all standardized.

Notes: that there are other legacy games out there that were limited to a specific brand of card or had special features that could only be accessed via specific brands of cards... Sierra Screamin 3D for example had a handful of games optimized specifically for it.