Problem is I can't speak for the rest of the UK as I am certain some slight regional variations exist. eBay is reasonably consistent with the local trend for other cards though. So far as I remember;
The V1 was vastly outnumbered by the Rage locally. Most people were noob or business users at the time though and just sat there with their S3/Matrox/Whatever in their cheap Time computer. The V1's and Rages were mostly from the small number of enthusiast, mostly comprised of a bunch of fat middle-aged guys who had no idea what they were doing and thought this "3D" was a fun experiment that would make them look cool. Only one store locally carried 3DFX cards - well, PC World probably sold them but it would have been an inflated price and nobody went there - in fact, I might still have price lists for several stores dating back to the late 1990s which demonstrate this. I would still say at least 90% of systems in this era didn't even have 3D cards, or cards that were barely 3D. In 1995 most computer owners in this city were still using 286-486 systems or 80s Micros like the Atari ST (Very popular) and were only just starting to consider an upgrade. Few of these people moved to Socket 5 machines and most held on long into Socket 7s lifespan.
In the V2 days the most common cards seem to be the Rage, Virge/Trio3D and Matrox Productivia, later SiS cards came into effect as Time really liked these along with the no-name brands which were starting to become more and more common, once again being bought by noobs who didn't know any better helping the SiS chips to thrive. Business systems often had either a Matrox Productivia or a Trio3D, some would use an ATI Magnum/Xpert though such as local Golding machines which ran CAD for a few local industries, their slower models used the Matrox. V2 cards are something I saw very little of and can only assume the sad middle-aged blokes never bought them, younger people seemed to be too busy with other things at that time and weren't really getting into it until the V3 was nearly here. Old people who bought computers seemed to like Tiny and these usually ran Virge cards. I honestly never encountered or heard of many people running V2s at all in this city. Met a guy at a LAN in the early 2000s and everyone was laughing at him - primarily as his Slot 1 Celery 266 was slow as shit anyway, not solely the outdated 3DFX board, but the whole system... They forgot about it when they realized my friend was running some modded Socket 5 machine. Strangely though a lot of new systems were bought in the V2 era, but mostly by noob users and these were generally Pentium MMX 166 boxes with little or no 3D at all, such users were happy with software mode. Enthusiasts who did get new systems in this era usually went with the Riva, especially if they wanted DVD capability and capture capability as this saved slots and offered good acceleration - the TNT M64 being a pretty common occurrence as a common consensus arose that 3DFX cards weren't something you wanted in your machine, the Rage held its place in the middle as a good trade-off for value/performance as well as offering that DVD capability some people wanted. There were also people holding off until Slot 1 got cheaper, knowing 3D cards would come down in price too.
Somewhere here, probably into the V3s life, there were a small percentage of people who bought PowerVR cards though this fizzled out quickly.
In the V3 days the SiS 6326 PCI was probably the best selling card of all. As more software required an accelerator and people wanted to watch DVDs on their PC. For the average know-nothing user these cards were cheap and they didn't care about the crappy frame rate, bugged textures or choppy DVD playback that much. Meanwhile the later TNTs and the GeForce 256 started selling very well as more enthusiasts showed up, the Rage was holding on somewhere in the middle but falling in popularity as the price of the nVidia boards dropped, people started jumping on the Radeon when it came along though because it offered a lot of bang-for-the-buck and didn't waste PCI slots like the old V2 did. Businesses still stuck with Matrox cards on some systems, though for 3D it was a very mixed bag at that time in that market and nobody seemed to know what to do, ATI still seeming favorable there. The V3 appears to have sold moderately well but nowhere close to the sheer number of late-model TNT cards, probably helped by the fact OEMs seem to have snapped the nVidia cards up quite quickly - not least of which, Advent and I believe also Tiny and Time. Most of the V3s that did get sold at this time were not installed long as software started moving away from supporting Glide well if at all, causing people to move to other cards quite quickly. Meanwhile ATI looked set to dominate the market as they were also well established in laptops at this time and it was clear they were about to blow nVidia out of the water: The smart man's money here was on waiting it out, as a CPU war was beginning and by extension, GPU technology would also accelerate rapidly, meaning better hardware and lower prices were just on the horizon.
V4 and V5 cards seem to be from the same time as each other and they never appeared anywhere. The card of choice for the hardcore user at this time was the Radeon 7500 as it simply beat everything else into submission. The GeForce 2 GTS actually didn't turn up too often and people seemed to favor the Radeon cards, the GeForce 2MX was the card for the enthusiast on a budget, switching places with the Radeon VE occasionally. The faster GeForce 2 models (Ti, Ultra) became more popular when the GeForce 3 arrived for some reason. For some other unknown reasons there were one or two die hard PowerVR people, some of them had to buy new computers instead of upgrading their existing one as they didn't want to sacrifice their PVR exclusive titles, so they had to keep their old machine to play them. By now most people didn't seem to know 3DFX were even there, or at least, that they had a new card around, plus DVD drives were now very cheap and people wanted a card which could decode them, something 3DFX were not known to be capable of. The small number of V5s I knew of were owned by very dissatisfied people who claimed they ran hot, sapped far too much power and did not perform quickly or stably. Having never owned one myself I cannot say if they were right or what the cards capabilities were, but the ones I had to change over sure looked ugly. It probably didn't help that, with its two GPUs it made people think of the ATI Rage Fury Max, ATI's attempt at sticking two GPUs on the same card hadn't worked well and, in fact, did not work at all in the latest OS - Microsoft Windows XP - giving the cards a negative connotation. Not to mention the sheer size of them in a time when IDE ports or RAM modules were usually, annoyingly, placed directly behind the AGP slot because MIDI-ATX cases had a tendency to have the CD Drive overhang the RAM, Power and associated caps if the board maker moved things further up the PCB, meaning it would be impossible to comfortably install the V5 to your motherboard in some cases. Many cheap cases even had the HDD cage here where it would be in the way of the card. But this is speculation as to why it didn't sell, I imagine a high price tag didn't help much either and computer component prices are inflated in the UK anyway (Not as bad as some other countries by far, but enough to make people think) so it was really doomed from the start. No idea where the V4 was in all of this and, as I say, never saw one, not even for sale in stores which did sell V5s. I remember said V5s ending up in the bargain bin by the end of 2002 and where they ended up at the end of it I don't know given they were still in the "MUST GO! CLEARANCE!" bin in December 2004 when I bought the last ISA NICs PC World ever sold... It's actually kind of sad. By now businesses were moving their 3D machines to Quadro cards where needed, but ever improving on-board video was proving to be good enough for lighter tasks in that environment and the common user who knew nothing was also happy to use this at home. Oddly, I think the Rage 128 was the chip of choice for servers at this time and for a great many years later.
By this time, with 3DFX out of the picture, my closest friends ran; Radeon 7500 later GeForce 4MX 420 - Me, knowing the 440 was more common but I couldn't afford one... GeForce 2 MX PCI - Tim's shitty modded Socket 5 K6 thing he kept until 2004 when he got a K7 with an FX 5900... GeForce 4 Ti 4800 - Derek's overpowered dual Xeon, most people preferred the 4600 which performed just as well if not better... Radeon 8500 - Charlotte's dual Coppermine in its final days before she moved to the Pentium IV, most people preferred Athlons but she was a girl so we let her off with it...
Not one of us had ever used a 3DFX device in these machines or the ones before - In my case, a Pentium MMX/SiS 6326. In Tim's case... Err... His same machine but with a Pentium 90 we thought (Was a strange machine). In Derek's case, I think an Athlon MP/GeForce 2 Ti and before that a Pentium III/Rage if memory serves me correctly. What Charlotte had before her PIII I have no idea, Celeron I seem to remember (I did look at it once as it was still in her closet) but I know it was Slot 1 and ran a TNT when it retired, I didn't like that machine, it was badly painted hot pink.
Past the V5 time and GeForce 2 days, the GeForce 4 Ti was the card to have while the 4MX filled the budget market well until the 6000 series came. I lost track past that point, finishing my K7 days on a Radeon 9200, then on my 775 running a FireGL V3100 briefly (Horrible card!) until moving to a 7300GS, to a 9600GSO, to a 260GTX and finally a 460GTX. 730GT being a likely candidate for the next machine. I know the 8800GT was popular for a time but I did not like it, finding the 8-series problematic. The Radeon 3870 was quite popular too and that was a nice card, as was the 5750 if not a little weak. It's funny though how the excitement of buying one never matches what it was back in those times, especially the Radeon 7500 days up to the 4 Ti days.
As I said, I have no idea if it was the same in all of the UK or even on the other side of town (though I suspect it was, given most of the shops are over there) but the systems I worked on, the people I met and the places I went, this was what seemed to be happening.
