Diamond Screams Banshee

As if the world didn't expect Diamond Multimedia to continue its close ties with 3Dfx Interactive, Diamond announced Wednesday its new Monster Fusion 2D/3D graphics accelerator powered by 3Dfx's latest Banshee processor.

The board features 16MB of RAM (SDRAM for the PCI version and SGRAM for the AGP version) and will supply Voodoo 3D performance along with high-end 2D processing on a single card. Monster Fusion zooms along with the help of 128-bit processing and a 250MHz RAMDAC giving the board amazingly high resolutions of up to 1920x1440.

For 3D nuts, the Monster Fusion will still be compatible with all the major APIs that you know and love: 3Dfx's Glide, Silicon Graphics' OpenGL ICD, and Microsoft's Direct3D under DirectX 6.0. And the board will be able to output over 60fps with 3D effects like real-time bump-mapping and Z-buffering up to 1600x120 x16bbp.

On the 2D side, the Banshee has full hardware GDI (Graphical Device Interface) acceleration for Windows applications. This means that your Pentium or Pentium II won't have to process as much graphical information and should lessen the burden on your processor so you can milk more speed from any 2D games that you play or any AVI, MPEG-1, and MPEG-2 movie files.

Diamond's Monster Fusion will come bundled with a full version of Microsoft's Motocross Madness (Diamond's version will also come with a special Diamond track and bike for the game as well).

So what if you already own a Monster 3D or Monster 3D II card? It looks like the only gamers that will really benefit from the card's merging of 2D and 3D are people who own an original Voodoo card or anyone who is looking to upgrade his 2D card. Diamond isn't offering any trade-up offers for current owners of Monster 3D II cards either. One word of note is that the Fusion will not allow you to use SLI with a Monster 3D II card, but if you have two Monster 3D II cards already in your PC, you can run all three cards although it sounds like overkill.

Diamond's Monster Fusion will sell for US$149.95 (PCI) and $159.95 (AGP) when it releases in late September and will be compatible with Windows 95/98 and Windows NT systems.