With the exception of games, the Nvidia GeForce 6200 AGP was good. I had one for a nice while.
I had one made my XFX, it had a nice heatsink and no fan and had 256MB RAM. 2D graphics were crystal clear, obviously all the cards made in the last few years have hardware acceleration for DVD so that was great and other video worked great too. It could even play DirectX9 games on low to medium settings (until you insisted on hardware intensive /demanding things like anti-aliasing or anisotropic filtering). That cost around £50 at the time, so probably cheaper now.
Far better than the Radeon 9250, probably not much, if any better than the 9550. You can normally find reviews with performance comparisons using Google.
Beware that there is some sort of PCI express version and cheapo "turbocache" versions which use system memory as graphics memory, merely to save money on the manufacturing and further hinder performance.