NV1 was visionary or embarrassing depending on your point of view. ;)
S3 and Matrox used to be big names.

Matrox were doing moderately well before 3DFX obliterated all competition. I can't honestly say that S3 ever made the slightest dent on this side of the pond. Apparently both are still going. Which is more than can be said for the 'blaze of glory' 3DFX brand.

S3 Virge was fairly well used...but for me, Cirrus Logic cards were the best - fewest hassles installing, loading and running. One of the best for compatibility with games.
Then they started phasing in the 3D-accelerator boards to run games with 3D capabilities. and a while later, the first "dual cards arrived, both video and 3DFX capable...
Still, there's quite a lot of games from then to choose from :P
1997 - 2000 or so...

Yeah, the Voodoo 3 was the last good card they made and the competitors (at least nVidia with their TNT2) caught up, then it started to decline and nVidia bought them shortly after the Voodoo 5 was released.

I actually had a Voodoo 5 5500 with its dual GPUs and a whopping 64MB VRAM. It outperformed the competition at the time, but was nonetheless a little late to the show. Still, I got it on the cheap when 3DFX fell, so I wasn't complaining.

i still can't work out how 3dfx managed to throw it all away... though i did read a detailed article about it once.
Archimedean Dynasty?
Tomb Raider (1? maybe 2?)
EF2000?
Though I think Redguard might be the winner... i never finished it though :-(

I love Archimedean Dynasty, but the graphics of the arcade-shooter portion weren't as good as the rendered static picture of the "bases". In fact, I'd put them on a par with Doom, or maybe Doom2.
Saying that, though, I'd buy it again from here if they can figure out how to get the USB joypads working properly in the arcade-shooter part...

Not Dos, but i can still remeber how blown away by The Last Ninja for the C-64, for a C-64 game it looked amazing in its day (screen shots now days just dont do it justice, jaded by looking at stuff nowdays i guess). its so hard, Alone In the Dark when it came out was amazing, but looking at it nowdays.. its looks horrible, but when it came out, nothing was like it.
I would have to second Bio forge (and most origin games) for there day they where very good.

I still have my RIVA 128 ZX, and I'm building a retro Windows 98 PC with it.

MDK and Ecstatica II