I'd use the Geforce 3 unless you're feeling a need to explore slower hardware. It's a great card and can handle high resolutions much better than the others. You can also mess around with its anti aliasing and anisotropic filtering options. It's the first card with MSAA and it also has the controversial Quincunx filter.

Or, try all of them and form your own opinion.

G400 doesn't really have any advantages aside from EMBM. Geforce 3 has that too though. It is possible your Nvidia cards have blurry crap VGA circuitry however. The impact of this depends on what resolution you run your desktop at. That's where you'll see the blur and, if the card is poor, higher resolutions get more and more blurry. G400s are all crystal clear.

swaaye wrote:

G400 doesn't really have any advantages aside from EMBM.

Can't really see how EMBM gives any advantages in 2D but maybe it's just me being stupid... The reason people are using Matrox cards for 2D, is not only cuz of the OK 2D performance, but it's because of their high quality RAMDAC's, when getting a Nvidia card from the shit ton of different manufactures, don't you really know what you get.
I bet you wouldnt be able se see the difference, but it can have a lot to say if you have a high-end CRT.
Personally a stick with Matrox G200. But in same cases have i also pared Voodoo2 cards with Riva TNT from ELSA or a Dynamic pictures Oxygen 402. Also quite decent agecorrect 2D cards.

GeForce 3 cards usually have good VGA quality (reference boards, ASUS).

I would go with the GeForce 3, that way you have D3D support as well.

if its a pure 3dfx build whichever card gives the sharpest image, as its only going to be used for 2d stuff. which is like others have said before, is why Matrox cards are popular. guaranteed decent image quality