For Windows 98, I would recommend 45.23. For Windows XP, the latest WHQL 93.71 drivers are good. I am referring to the reference Nvidia drivers for both of these.

Alright, thanks a lot!

There's no single nVidia driver that's perfect for every game. Version 45.23 is often recommended (for both Windows 9x and 2000/XP) because of its good balance of speed, compatibility and stability.
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Start with 45.23 and, unless it has an unusual problem with a certain game, just leave it alone and enjoy your game.

Try different versions.

The 45.23 drivers are good enough. But I noticed one rather strange nuance. For some reason, with this version of the driver, on all tested Intel machines, rather strange results were obtained in the " DPC Latency Checker "(See screenshots attached to the message) during the run of the test demo in Half-life (cl_gg 1; gg test.dem), using Direct3D mode (- nosound -d3d-window -w 640). With other versions of drivers, this was not observed. Red "bars" appeared at the moments of the highest load, when there was a lot of smoke, text on the screen, and FPS, respectively, significantly decreased. In idle time, the delay is usually quite normal (3-5 µs), and the problem only manifests itself when the video card is significantly loaded in Direct3D mode (On the GeForce Ti 4200 and on the GeForce FX it was about the same):

If this nv25 based core you can use even older driver such a version 28.90