Well, I got all the cards ('cept a Geforce3 and KyroII, which I don't think are worth trying), such as the Voodoo5, Radeon 64 VIVO, Geforce2 Ultra, Matrox G400Max/G450. I don't have to say one card is better because that's all I got, or because I dumped one card for the one I'm using now. Since I'm running AGP/PCI combos, I can switch almost on-the-fly thru the BIOS and compare.
The BEST image quality I've ever seen is a Voodoo5 set to HIGH quality settings using V5Launcher, e.g., LOD -2.0, 4xFSAA, etc. It craps on a Radeon and it's 128-tap anisotrophy. The latter is nothing more than an LOD BIAs tweak short of producing shimmering and distortion of perspective lines.
Only problem is, frame rates with the Voodoo5 set this way are not playable (by playable I mean >60-70 fps at 1024x768x32 bit at everything set to High in QuakeIII Arena). Perhaps a Voodoo6 or Rampage would have allowed that.
Then there's the FSAA. The Voodoo5 has enough power to run most games at 1024x768x16 bit and 2xFSAA. Nothing comes close to it. It's amazing how it alleviates the jaggies yet textures and details are still crisp. You haven't lived till you've seen Serious Sam or Half-Life with it.
3dfx absolutely HAD to come up with a workable FSAA because as is the case with the Radeon, the visuals are so sharp it's distracting. The Radeon is too sharp and contrasty for it's own good, so the jaggies are terrible, and forget about its FSAA (full of s _ _ _ anti-aliasing). And it plain doesn't have the polish of the Voodoo5 on the QuakeII-engine and older games, where everything has a nice silky texture and sheen to it. As for the Geforce, frame rates are amazing, but there's the soft image quality and rather dull palette. And the gamma is just too dark and unacceptable on all the older games (even relatively new ones like Crimson Skies). If you don't know, there are still new games coming out based on the QuakeII engine.
Yep, it's too bad 3dfx is gone. I really doubt ATI or NVIDIA will ever approach such unsurpassed image quality, perfect gamma, and workable FSAA for years to come.