Here's a weird story for ya along these lines.
I have had for years a Voodoo3 3000 AGP in my K62-400 system, and it has done fairly well, though I can't play any of the modern games. It will run D2 just fine, so long as I don't have 8 actual players on the screen at once, don't build summoners of any type, and run with most of Foxbat's lag reduction methods enabled.
So one day I decided to get this ATI Radeon 9200, packaged by STI Labs. I get it installed, download the latest drivers, fire up D2's video tester and try things out. Result: sluggish gameplay and menu animations in all modes, though DirectDraw was a bit faster than Direct3D, neither mode was safely playable. I tried re-installing D2 and LoD; same result. I tried re-installing the card with the drivers that came on the CD; same result.
I tried logging onto Battle.net and yet more weirdness ensued. While I could connect to my ISP normally, using 56k dialup, it seemed to take forever to log onto Battle.net and get to the character selection screen. However, only once was I able to actually log on with a character and get into a public channel, and when that happened, you could watch the frames of animation occur and count them off. All other attempts resulted in failure; no message saying realm down or anything, the game just seemed to hang when I selected a character to log in with, and it stayed that way until I clicked cancel.
Finally, after much frustration, I uninstalled the ATI drivers, re-installed my Voodoo3 and it's drivers, did the video test and selected Glide, and then I was back in business. D2 ran great, and Battle.net was accessible again. All of this occured over a period of about a month. The ATI card is sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
I've had trouble with ATI cards in the past, but was seeing positive reviews of the Radeon line, so I figured I'd try it out. Maybe it just didn't like my old system. I don't know.
In addition, I'm still running Win98SE and my system has 384 megs of system memory.
I have had for years a Voodoo3 3000 AGP in my K62-400 system, and it has done fairly well, though I can't play any of the modern games. It will run D2 just fine, so long as I don't have 8 actual players on the screen at once, don't build summoners of any type, and run with most of Foxbat's lag reduction methods enabled.
So one day I decided to get this ATI Radeon 9200, packaged by STI Labs. I get it installed, download the latest drivers, fire up D2's video tester and try things out. Result: sluggish gameplay and menu animations in all modes, though DirectDraw was a bit faster than Direct3D, neither mode was safely playable. I tried re-installing D2 and LoD; same result. I tried re-installing the card with the drivers that came on the CD; same result.
I tried logging onto Battle.net and yet more weirdness ensued. While I could connect to my ISP normally, using 56k dialup, it seemed to take forever to log onto Battle.net and get to the character selection screen. However, only once was I able to actually log on with a character and get into a public channel, and when that happened, you could watch the frames of animation occur and count them off. All other attempts resulted in failure; no message saying realm down or anything, the game just seemed to hang when I selected a character to log in with, and it stayed that way until I clicked cancel.
Finally, after much frustration, I uninstalled the ATI drivers, re-installed my Voodoo3 and it's drivers, did the video test and selected Glide, and then I was back in business. D2 ran great, and Battle.net was accessible again. All of this occured over a period of about a month. The ATI card is sitting on a shelf collecting dust.
I've had trouble with ATI cards in the past, but was seeing positive reviews of the Radeon line, so I figured I'd try it out. Maybe it just didn't like my old system. I don't know.
In addition, I'm still running Win98SE and my system has 384 megs of system memory.