GF's never had decent image quality until the GF3's. Even now, they still don't match the quality that ATI and even better Matrox provide.
And if you're interested in dual head or better displays then you are interested in 2D Image Quality over pretty much everything else. The 8500's and Paherlia also have the advantage of being DirectX8 in hardware, with the P. having over half of the proposed DirectX9 feature set