I thought I'd let you all into the loop after my recent visits to Diamond Multimedia up in San Jose. Although I've signed a whole bunch of NDAs (groan...) I'll filter through some stuff that I can say. First off, being Diamond Multimedia you KNOW that a product line-up is being finalised with it coming up to Xmas. Basically, they've got Santa parked outside the front door.

The one that most people are waiting for is the TNT based product and I was given a quick showing of their latest rev. of the board. The board itself had some 16MB of slightly slower SDRAM (as opposed to SGRAM) and was a slightly later rev. than the one featured a few weeks back on the 'sneak preview tour'. Bob Nelson of Diamond Multimedia went on to say, "If you compare the Forsaken and Turok scores since the sneak preview took place some weeks ago, you can see that the board has matured and its performance is ramping up as development progresses". And for your added pleasure, I got to take these scores taken from a Pentium II 400Mhz with 64MB PC100 RAM:

Forsaken 800x600 ran at 132.4 fps
Turok 800x600 ran at 110 fps

So where the hell is Quake2 then eh? Well I was shown Quake 2 and YES it worked and YES it ran in 800x600 and 1600x1200 just as it was back when I saw nVidia's reference board. But although the score was slightly faster than the ones that I've seen sprinkled on the NET, Diamond stated that their OpenGL drivers are being done in-house, which means we can expect some slightly meatier scores. As soon as I can post the whole enchilada on this thing- I will. Interestingly enough Diamond weren't really pitching the product as the ultimate gaming card. It's not going to be a Hardcore Quake2 buff's card. It's just not going to let rip over a couple of Voodoo2's in SLI. Sure the 1600x1200 resolution will be great for sniping but at what cost to the frame rate? I reckon they still expect the hardcore gamer to opt for the currently unbeatable Voodoo2 SLI solution. Thus, their Monster 3D II should soldier on this Xmas. Nothing can quite match the Quake2 performance of the Voodoo2 in SLI as yet. Except of course a couple of piggybacked VLB Headland Tech. 512K… just kidding folks. Nevertheless, Diamond are somewhat optimistically shooting for a late September release for their TNT based product. I can't quite see that happening as nobody has yet seen a final rev. board running at the 125Mhz clock speed. But we'll all live in hope I guess.