That performance doesn't seem normal for that machine, it could probably the the VIA chipset on the motherboard which are quite a gamble. Did you try different chipset drivers besides the graphics card?

Another thing is which sound card are you currently using? It is using WDM or VXD? This also affects the performance of the computer.

Iirc they only had one driver available on ASUS's website and it was bundled in some installer. I'll try and hunt down a different and individual driver for the chipset. Another thing to mention is that AGP cards will not work without the ViA AGP drivers. As for the soundcard, the machine has none. Neither onboard nor dedicated. I do have a USB to headset jack adapter that I just use for sound with the generic windows 98 driver. But I have used that in other Win98 machines with no trouble. Thank you for the reply.

Alright, so, I've done a little hunting for drivers and some testing on Windows 98. I got some legacy chipset drivers off VIA's website which did actually improve performance and cleared up some of the weird issues. But the thing is, the performance still is not what it should, or at least what I'd imagine it to be. The 3Dmark score for 2001SE is now 6373 3Dmarks. And I've noticed that things like particle effects and little pieces of debris flying everywhere severely tanks performance.

For the graphics cards you should use older drivers that are compatible since the latest ones has more CPU overhead.

Also the Radeon 9600 Pro is bottlenecked by the CPU. Since your motherboard supports Tualatin-based CPUs you should go for these as they are much faster than the Coppermine-based ones.