I believe the 3dfx Banshee card actually had the fastest 2D engine of the era. All 256 windows raster ops were implemented in hardware, and if I recall correctly, it was one of (if not the first) to hit the maximum theoretical Windows 2d performance. It had some ungodly wide internal 2D engine (128 bit?). It was significantly faster than the awesome Tseng Labs ET6000w32, which had been my 2D card of choice before then. 2D was really the banshee's only saving grace, since it was missing the 2nd texture unit from the Voodoo2.
Perhaps you are thinking of the Riva TnT, which had similar 2d performance to the banshee, voodoo3, and an assortment of Matrox cards, as by then pretty much everyone had maxxed out 2D performance.