The cirrus logic cards were also cheap, but as they were accelerators they were a lot faster than the older trident 8900x based cards. I remember reading a 1993 magazine that was having a test for 386sx pcs. They were affordable pcs for that time, but supposed to run windows. The first was a 386sx-40 which had a CL 5426 card, and had the best score, and the second was an IBM 386sx-25 with a CL 5422, that had also very decent performance. However some systems had trident 8900 cards. They described this chip as "ancient", and (I quote the exact words from one) "we have to mention again, that this chip and also the cards that make use of it, are ancient and suitable only for upgrading 286 systems graphics cards, for our kids to play PacMan. The limitation of the 8bit DAC to only 256 color doesn't bother us so much, as even in that case you have to wait for a century for a window to move"..... I guess the latter has to do with that specific card, as some others I think had drivers for more than 256 colors.
From my experience, I remember having just upgraded to a Pentium 100 with 8MB ram. I had a cheap 256kb vga, and I wanted to run Need For Speed, so I couldn't as it required at least a 512kb SVGA. So I bought a used trident 8900 with 1MB. The game would play, even on high resolution. It wasn't as fast as possible, but I remember it being playable( as opposed to my best friends 486dx2/66 with VL bus CL card that would play it only on low-res). And then I bought a CL PCI card(I think 5436), and with that the game would run perfect.