An S3 Trio 64 or S3 ViRGE 325* is never a bad choice, I guess.
It has a decent VGA core, quick 2D acceleration and very good driver support (OS/2, Win 3x/9x/..).
More precisely, it can accelerate the Windows GDI primitives (draw lines, circles, fill, flip etc) in Windows 3.x and up, can do bit-blit etc.
It has hardware mouse cursor, does support DCI (Win 3.1), can do colour conversion (YUV etc), do video overlays and so on.
On Win95+ it is compatible with DirectX 3.0 out-of-box, for example.
The card can do Direct Draw 1.0 and Direct3D 5 (?, ViRGE only).
On OS/2 Warp 4, both GRADD and DiVE are supported.
VESA VBE is either VBE 1.2 or VBE 2.x, depending on the VGA BIOS that resides in that ROM chip. If you're out of luck, you get a VBE 1.x card. Then you can run S3VBE20 tool.
Or, If you have an EPROM programmer and a blank chip, you can easily download and install a recent VGA BIOS.
The S3 Trio/Virge series is relative simple, making these exchanges comparably simply.
Other or newer cards have critical parameters like timings and voltages stored in the ROM.
The only downside of these S3 cards that come to mind:
They have that "bright black" issue, which can be fixed, I heard.
Another interesting PCI card was the ELSA Gloria, btw.
It was a big PCI card with an OpenGL accelerator and an integrated ViRGE 325 (as a solid 2D/VGA core).
Edit: The ViRGE had bad D3D support, as you know.
That was because the ViRGE essentially predated Direct3D.
The internals of the ViRGE apparently did differ so much from D3D that the designers had trouble making usable drivers.
Anyway, Direct3D games that were designed for Direct3D v3 *might* run acceptable.
Alternatively, Software Rendering or the Voodoo card drivers might be able to compensate for this.
Edit: This is how Final Reality performed on my Pentium 133 (no MMX) with a 325.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ujfl3fwb2aE
Please keep in mind, though, that FR was a DX5 benchmark and that the ViRGE was able to pull off most effects here.
An older Win95 game might run better than this. Especially when run on a somewhat faster 233Mhz Pentium with MMX. 😉
(* The original ViRGE is fully compatible with the Trio 64v+. It can use all its drivers.
The 325 also can run unpatched S3D titles, and had headroom for overclocking.)
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