Since the days of the Matrox Millennium 2D performance of graphic cards got pretty close to the limit and nowadays the latest graphic cards don't differ much in 2D performance anymore, most of them are pretty fast, faster than the old standard of the Matrox Millennium. 3D performance is the most important topic to distinguish between different graphic cards today. Cards without 3D acceleration will soon disappear from the market and Matrox had to learn this the hard way when releasing the Millennium II with hardly any 3D features. They lost their market leader position in an instance. S3 used to be a big player in the graphic chip market, but the mediocre 3D performance of their chip got them almost completely out of business.
Similar things seem to happen to Cirrus Logic and others.
DOS performance , which nowadays is to be equalized with game performance for DOS based games for all professional applications today are running under a graphical user interface operating system. DOS based games are disappearing as well, so that this performance is getting less and less important. Video Display performance in my eyes is still not that important to most of us, but whoever likes to watch and process videos on his computer will have to look for a fast video processing card. DVD will probably bring a significant change here. The Monitor plays a crucial role in terms of sharpness, brightness, stability and max.