From what I remember, and I'm possibly wrong with this, the Matrox Millenium cards were the last generation where 2D performance was a design focus - the Matrox

From what I remember, and I'm possibly wrong with this, the Matrox Millenium cards were the last generation where 2D performance was a design focus - the Matrox RAMDAC was the best there was at the time. After the Voodoo 3 was released (IIRC the first combined 2D+3D accelerated video card) the 3D arms race started, but 2D performance hasn't moved a lot since then (at least in consumer-level hardware), hence the move to software being written in OpenGL etc. to benefit from hardware 3D acceleration. I'm guessing that "workstation" cards (designed for CAD etc.) may have moved on a bit since then, though.