Radeon 8500 is an interesting board. I used one for a few years.
But: 😉
-anisotropic filtering can't work at the same time as trilinear filtering and is also extremely angle dependent (misses many textures)
-doesn't support MSAA and its SSAA imparts a gigantic performance hit starting at 50% for 2x.
-drivers are quite buggy even after years of work (probably hardware issues)
One big oops of the 8500 was that ATI screwed up with their texture cache design and crippled the chip. This came up most notably with Doom3 where even though the 8500 does fewer rendering passes, thanks to its superior pixel shader capabilities, it's still slower than a GeForce 4. Bummer.
I still think that GF4MX is nicer because it has fewer image quality constraints even if it's only DX7. It also will most likely be less buggy. But I am jealous of that Hercules card you have. They are hard to find. I just have a plain 64MB 8500.