S3 ViRGE usually works out ok because S3 hardware was so popular back then. You may want to get S3VBE and S3SPDUP to fill out their VESA capabilities if you have problems or major speed issues.

You could also give this card a try:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/video/display/savage4.html

It has the S3 Savage 4pro GPU, which might be a good choice if you want to use your machine with Win98 and early 3d-games too. It is pretty fast (compared to a Virge "3d-decelarator") and supports S3TC (texture compression) natively which looks nice in Unreal. I used it for a while, and it seemed to me as if S3 didn't change much regarding the dos/ VGA / vesa features (it seems the same as the Virge core) - in any case I had no problems with it in DOS.

Does a GX2 on an AGP bus work for early DOS 3d games? Does a Savage like this work for the "s3d" games?

The Savage does not work for S3D games.

An GX2 on AGP bus should work in my opinion.

A bump in an emulation forum?

My fault. I found this while Google searching, and did not look at the hierarchy of the forum before posting.