Interstate '76 Arsenal Edition is coming up soon, and I felt I should inform the community that the textures used for the 3D-accelerated 3dfx Glide version of the game are noticeably higher quality than the Direct3D version (both ports were included on the same disc). I had an old Pentium 3 with a 3dfx Voodoo2 and a few years back I threw I76 on it, ran both ports and there was a big difference despite both running at 800x600 with exactly the same graphics settings. At the time of the game's release, Nvidia & ATI cards only supported Direct3D, which was simply a slower graphics wrapper than Glide, hence the reduction in texture quality to keep the FPS up to the same level.
I'll see if I can get a comparison shot in the next few days. It's very easy to spot the difference in the opening cinematic; there's a sign post that is clear & legible in 3dfx but unreadable in Direct3D!

Yeah, i think you're right. I remember spending ages playing around with glide wrappers trying to get that version to work reliably...

Same here.

I've got the retail version of this game, and had no trouble at all making Glide mode work by using dgVoodoo.
Still shots of the signposts are the easiest way to show the difference in quality, though I also found the frame rate dodgy in D3D. Here are some screenshots.

Gah. I thought dgvoodoo might be the answer to my prayers for several old games, but google warns that the site has like 7 viruses and 5 trojans... so i can't even load up the site to check. sigh.
You're right on the screenshots though. Does it affect anything else like car textures, car interiors or explosion textures? It's so long since I played it that I can't remember...

I installed the game, it created two shortcuts - I76 and Nitro. I assume both are software.
How do I run it in glide?
And is it possible somehow to get higher res in glide?
Thanks.

It should've created the Glide shortcuts too, I think. Just change the shortcut's target to say
"X:\Interstate 76 Arsenal\interstate 76\i76.exe" -glide
or
"X:\Interstate 76 Arsenal\Interstate 76 Nitro Pack\nitro.exe" -glide
Remember to change the directories and drive to the correct ones. If you Want D3D instead of Glide, swap -glide to -d3d.

The -glide switch worked for me, but now I'm locked in @640x480 with no way to change to a higher resolution. Any way to fix this?

That openglide doesn't worked for me, there was no textures at all.
But when I used gdvoodoo and fix about all the settings (in gdvoodoosetup.exe) to 'high' and 'hardware'-powered, then I got it working.
Now I don't have any significant (if any at all) flickering or missing textures. I have only tested the game in tutorial map so far, so maybe I can't say for sure about the whole game..

I'm also limited to 640x480.
I also get the graphic rainbow glitches. I can't seem to get the batch file solution mentioned elsewhere to work.

Glide is maxed at 640x480, as is Direct3D. No idea if it's possible to higher than that, but it's a limitation that was in the original game.

Direct3D is maxed at 1024x768 on mine.
Not sure why they'd put a resolution option in, if there is only one choice available.

That gdvoodoo allowed settings for different resolutions, I use 1280x786 (or something), but I don't know if it works for you guys.. It's not perfect but little bit better than original.

Voodoo 1 cards supported 640x480 and 800x600 16 bit color.
Voodoo 2 still only did 800x600 max with a single card and 1024x768 with 2 cards in SLI. There were 2 models of Voodoo 2 (8MB and 12MB).
Back in this game's day, to run it at 1024x768 with glide you had to have a Voodoo 2 SLI minimum.
As a side note - I still have my original Voodoo 2 SLI cards (2 creative labs 12MB Voodoo2's). They were $300 USD a piece on release day (the 12 MB cards).