Look for any drivers that may have been released in the last few months and update your dx installation to 9a (Freelancer cd only has dx 9 on it)

Unfortunately, the 3DFX chipset was never given a technology revision in it's entire history and as a result the Voodoo cards have been pretty much rendered obsolete. It may come as a suprise to Voodoo owners but even the Voodoo 5 card is not much more than a Voodoo1 card on crack and with a much bigger brain. Aside of what was required to keep them selling (addition of AGP, D3D support, better resolutions, higher clock speeds, ETC...) there has been virtually nothing done to upgrade the 3DFX technology.

Freelancer's readme even states that no 3DFX chipsets are supported what-so-ever.

Your only real guaranteed solution is to buy a card either with a Geforce2 (or better) chipset or a Radeon based card.

The Nvidia chips seem to perform better in Freelancer, but if you do anything involving video capture at all, you'll want a Radeon chipset in your video card.