Soft video plugin question

[crumbworks]

I'm sorry if this is a bit long, but I've never been that good at being brief. When I think of the soft video plugin, I imagine that this plugin utilizes your software in order to run, instead of relying heavily on hardware. This seems best for those who have a good PC without the best video card. I am almost positive I am right on this as when I go a soft driver's configuration, it says "DirectDraw Soft Renderer" which leads me to believe that it does in fact rely off software, not hardware.

Now, another thing I've noticed about the Soft plugin is that it literally softens the screen, making it slightly blurry.

For games with a lot of 3D polygon movement (like some heavy cutscenes in Xenogears), I only achieve a perfectly consistent framerate with the soft plugin... the D3D plugins work, but they are skippy during heavy 3D moments for some reason. Perhaps I need to tweak my video plugin settings, or perhaps my video card just can't handle them. Any other game works fine with all the D3D plugins, except Xenogears. It gives me a problem unless I use the soft plugin, which I personally dislike due to the blurriness.

So I ask... 1) is there a way I can use the hardware accelerated plugins and still have Xenogears run at consistent framerate, or 2) if I cannot, does the software plugin *have to* soften the screen, or can it attempt to draw crisply like the other plugins?

Here are my specs, in case they are asked for:

Pentium 4, 1.5 GHz
512 MB of RAM
nVidia Riva TNT2 M64 with 32 MB of VRAM

Available video plugins that I use:
Pete's D3D Driver 1.75
Pete's DX6 D3D Driver 1.75 <-- the one I usually use.
Pete's OpenGL Driver 1.75
P.E.Op.S. Soft Driver 1.4

I use the default D3D video settings, except I run in 640x480 fullscreen (I think default is 800x600) and I always use #6 texture filtering (extended + smoothed sprites) ...these settings work perfectly fine for anything but heavy 3D scenes in games like Xenogears. I would mention other games, but none of others I have are really anywhere near 3D (valkyrie profile, castlevania, final fantasy tactics, final fantasy origins, grandia, suikoden, etc.)

Also, sound is not an issue, but I use Eternal SPU, just for reference.

Now, to run Xenogears, there is a user on this board that provides those screenshots of the 'ideal' video setting for this game. At first, I wasn't achieving any video during the cutscenes (screen would go weird and black and stuff) and his page helped me realize I needed to enable level 3 framebuffer access (Gfx card buffer reads and moves) in Pete's OpenGL driver for it to work... so I did, and I can see the video fine using this video driver, but it does NOT run at a strong framerate. I even turned texture filtering to 0: None, but that didn't change anything in the way of framerate.

Sorry that this is so long, but in case I sidetracked and lost you anywhere, I'd like to know:
1) Which video plugin (and with what settings) will produce a consistent and error-free run for this game.
2) And, if I'm not able to get this due to the fact that my outdated video card is garbage, can I set my software-based video plugin so that it doesn't soften my screen?

[Mr. Killjoy]

There is a feature in the plugin that allows you to disable DDraw, it's the check box where it's said you'll lose about 50% of your FPS... but if it's a fast CPU there's no problem with it

You can also use the DX control panel to diable DDraw but don't forget it also affects every PC games