I purchased a Radeon 32MB DDR back in the day. Should have gotten a GeForce2 instead, but they were way more expensive at the time. And the GeForce2 MX was too slow for me. So I picked one up, and from day one I had a major headache with it. Had my share of driver issues and compatibility issues with older games. Visual anomalies were especially present with those. And it took quite an effort to get Unreal to run properly on that thing too. And it didn't like my Voodoo2 card either. But it did teach me to be more familiar with hacking the Windows registry. 🤣 @ ati drivers
Once I got a GeForce2 Ti about a year later though, it was a sigh of relief. So what if the Radeon supported EMBM; very few games at the time made use of it anyway, so no big loss. Couple months later I then got a new mobo and CPU and decided to give ATI another shot by purchasing a Radeon 8500, judging by the cheap price compared to GeForce4 cards. Same old BS all over again. Sure the performance was nice but there were quite a few quirks (especially with visual quality) with that card that I could never fathom down. A couple months later I splurged and got a GeForce3 card instead. Less compatibility issues with games, and anti-aliasing was actually usable. I sold my 8500 on ebay many years ago.
The R3xx cards restored my faith in ATI and their drivers, however. The last ATI card I purchased was a Sapphire X1600XT PCI-E (not counting another X1600 Pro AGP that I got for free). To me the R5xx was their last great line of products. Not so sure about afterward.
Long story short, my faith has always been in NVIDIA for their compatibility (with both hardware and software) and superb drivers, beginning with the TNT (except for their FX line). Not sure if I'll ever go back into the red camp. As I've also mentioned before I've had my share of compatibility issues with DOS games with earlier ATI chips. And on top of that they were crap for a lot of 3D games. If there's one thing the Rage 128 and original Radeon were good at though, it was that they didn't take as much of a performance hit as their competitors did in 32-bit color rendering mode.
And yes, in the pre-2000 era, 3deefx was the hallmark for game compatibility. Buy a Voodoo(3) card and virtually any game will run on it without a hiccup (except maybe early DOS Glide games and MW2).