There are so many different games from many different eras running on very different hardware... There is no generic rule why games crash. It could be different DX version, drivers version, processor and and and... It's much easier to find hints why a specific game fails...

Under 98 and 2000, this particular game [crappy old Hellboy game by Cryo] just disappears when it crashes, on anything I have tried it on, except the original system I used. There are particular events that trigger the crashes, but only 99% of the time.

I was going to try and rebuild the p3 system I had it on 5+ years ago, but as a last resort I thought I'd try it with XP. Crashed as usual but gave a long-winded error report this time, couldn't make much sense of it as it seemed to list hundreds of files [I'm used to things saying "error in dx3.dl" or "glide2 not found" or some such]. However, it made me try it in Windows 95 compatibility mode. Wow. It's crashed once or twice since [not the usual places] but it's a buggy game anyhow and I've now got further than ever before and it's still playable [it used to get to one of several points and then refuse to get any further]. So I reckon the problem is solved.

All a bit beyond me as to why it should now work, but that doesn't really matter unless it starts failing again.

I can say with certainty that, at least in the past, there have been programs that have required patching before they could run on an AMD machine without crashing. But this was back in the K6/K7 era.

Also, I'm pretty sure there are games from not so long ago that were not programmed with the last few years' worth of increased processor speed in mind.