I'm sure this isn't what you want to hear, but here I go anyway:

In my experience, there isn't a "best" Radeon R300 driver for Win9x. There isn't even a good one. They're all mediocre. The Omega drivers might be an improvement, but I found those to be only slightly less flaky than the official Catalyst drivers.

Under Win9x, Radeon R300 cards don't support table fog or 8-bit palletized textures. If you don't play any games that use those features you'll be fine.

Under WinXP, the final few revisions of R300 Catalyst drivers re-enabled table fog and 8-bit palletized textures. I have had much better success with Radeon R300 cards under WinXP. My Radeon 9600XT and 9800XT cards work quite well under WinXP, in fact.

For Win9x, you're much better off with a GeForce 4 or FX card.

If you're curious about the Omega drivers, here is Archive.org's last snapshot of the site:

https://web.archive.org/web/20150708091749/ht … egadrivers.net/

The Radeon 9000 is actually an R200 card, R300 is the Radeon 9500-9800 range. I know it's confusing, but that's how ATI did it back then.

With that being said, if you're confident you won't be playing any titles that need 8-bit palettized textures, maybe try a driver version that's somewhat period-correct for better performance (I normally use Catalyst 3.1, but any driver version from 2002-2004 should be usable).

For table fog: there's a registry hack that re-enables it on most Windows 9x drivers (link to forum post with information on this).

KT7AGuy wrote:

For Win9x, you're much better off with a GeForce 4 or FX card.

How ironic. I remember hearing someone having a better experience with the Radeon 9xx0 cards than the Geforce FX-series cards a long time ago (then again, I think he also mentioned not bothering with the 4x.xx drivers because he thought they would be too old to work with his Geforce FX cards), maybe consider a Geforce 2-4 video card as an alternative just to be safe.

Win9x v45.23 NVIDIA drivers work with both FX 5900 Ultra and Quadro FX 3000 cards. They can also be made to work with 5950 Ultra cards by adding/changing hardware IDs.

Thanks for the info regarding R200 vs R300 9xxx series cards. I was ignorant of that. I had assumed that the OP meant he was using a 9600, 9700, or 9800 card based on his CPU choice of Athlon XP. A Radeon 9000 seems like such an anemic card to pair with even the slowest of Athlon XP CPUs. Is there some advantage that I'm unaware of? 9600XT cards are still plentiful and cheap on eBay.

I bought my first 9600XT over a decade ago because it was about as fast as a GF4 Ti4600 but used about 1/8th the power and runs so cool that you can put a passive heatsink on it. I ran it in my HTPC until three years ago when I upgraded to a C2D and Radeon 5770 for my entertainment center.

I went with a Radeon 9000 Pro because from what I've seen on YouTube and all, it's supposed to have a pretty good balance of not being ridiculously fast but also not slow. I already have a WinXP Core 2 Duo setup for somewhat newer XP/DX9-era games, so I really don't want to use XP on here. I want to use this PC for games using DirectX 8.1 or earlier and games I've had trouble getting to run on my XP PC such as Croc, Riana Rouge, Moto Racer, etc. Also, I didn't really choose the CPU. I got the PC for free at a recycling center, so I take what I can get, and I'm happy that it is fully capable of running Win98. Other than what I've mentioned earlier, it's going pretty well so far.

I'll try to check out Catalyst 3.1 or the Omega drivers soon. Thanks for the info you all have been giving me so far.

Actually, KCompRoom2000, is there any way you can send me Catalyst 3.1 for Win9x? I can't seem to find a working download. For whatever reason, I haven't been able to download anything from OldApps for a while.

+1 for the Omega drivers. I used them back in the day on my Radeon 9700pro. I didn't have many problems from what I remember. I did have some problems more recently when I was using my ATI cards with a VIA chipset, disabling fast writes fixed it though. I'm pretty sure the 9000pro is RV250. Try this link, I think they are the cat 3.1 http://www.helpjet.net/Fs-33694184-78312486-76576249.html