The game is trying to convert texture files (from .txd format to something your GPU can render) but is failing. The "hot" part typically means:
If the game crashes before you can even enter settings, you can force a safe video mode via a command line.
If you can get the game to open for a brief moment, or if this error happens only when you enter a vehicle or a specific zone, you likely have a display setting conflict.
Modern graphics cards run GTA 3 at hundreds or thousands of frames per second. The original game engine was not built for this. When the frame rate gets too high, the physics engine breaks and texture streaming fails, resulting in this crash.
In-Game:
For advanced users: You can manually tell GTA III how much video memory to use.
This prevents the game from trying to allocate more VRAM than its legacy code can handle, stopping the "cannot convert textures" panic.
