Diamond's New Stealth Fighter

On Wednesday, Diamond Multimedia introduced the next generation of its Stealth line of video accelerators, the Stealth II G460. The new board will be powered by Intel's first leap into the 3D/2D graphics market - its Intel704 (or i740).

The Stealth II G460, the company's first AGP 2X compliant card, will ship in April for around US$200 for Pentium II-based PCs.

The 2X board will serve up faster and larger textures for gamers. (G Police owners who choose "extreme" graphics on that game's setup will use the G460 to the fullest.)

Features of the board include a one-piece 2D/3D and digital video playback through MPEG-1. It will ship with drivers for both Windows 95 and Windows NT 4.0, and drivers for Windows 98 will be on their way as well. OpenGL and Direct3D APIs will be supported for running your games in full 3D.

The board offers a standard set of 3D features including bilinear and trilinear filtering, MIP-mapping, anti-aliasing, flat shading, Gouraud shading, perspective correction, and z-buffering. On the 2D side, the board houses a 203MHz DAC that delivers a top resolution of 1600x1200 and true color support at 1024x768. Diamond's own InControl software will enable you to change resolutions on the fly without rebooting.

Users can also upgrade to PCI DVD with Diamond's DVD Kit, and when accompanied by a Diamond DTV 2000 TV tuner, you can watch full-screen DVD on your TV.