Diamond Talks

After Monday's announcement by Diamond Multimedia's competitor Creative Technologies that it would bring a 12MB Voodoo 2-based board to the market on February 20, GameSpot has been buzzing with what an additional 4MB of memory would do for our favorite 3Dfx-enhanced titles.

Diamond's upcoming Monster 3D II, the sequel to its well-established Monster 3D, will launch into the market with 8MB, and Diamond's vice president of marketing, Ken Wirt, talked to GameSpot News about the advantages and disadvantages of placing 12MB on a Voodoo 2 board and why Diamond chose to use 8MB.

The one major reason right now is that there just aren't any games that would really need to use the extra memory since the new chipset is so fast anyway. Wirt said that the only game title out on the market right now that would use the added memory would be Psygnosis' G-Police. Diamond's position is that the only way to really gain better performance is to buy two boards that would divide the processing and give a game twice the performance. This would allow the power of each board to only think about half the screen with a full 8MB of memory. This is marginally better although it does cost more. "Using 12MB in a board isn't a bad thing, but there just wouldn't be as much of an advantage with the added memory," Wirt added.

When we asked when the Monster 3D II would hit the market, Wirt responded by saying, "We're working as fast as possible without any sacrifices in quality." He went on to say that Diamond was working to make firm drivers for the board that would not be the standard reference drivers, with the goal of keeping Diamond's initial Monster 3D drivers up to date with very few bugs.

We asked if Diamond had any plans to make a board like the Obsidian, which puts two boards on a single board. Wirt said that it could be done, but putting all three chips of each board, plus memory, on one board would be difficult because of all the heat that would be on the one board. Plus, he said that the gamer would have to pay a premium price instead of just buying the two boards.

If you get either one of these boards before we do, let us know.