"With a range of products at varying prices points and performance levels, the Fire GL series offers uncompromised, high-end 3D graphics performance to 3D animators, digital content and simulation creators, CAD users," said Ed Huang, director of professional graphics at Diamond Multimedia Systems. "The new pricing, performance enhancements and configurations we are announcing today make this award-winning product line an even greater value to professional graphics users of all levels of expertise."

The latest hardware and software optimizations engineered for the Fire GL 4000 have increased its graphics performance by 20%. Additionally, the Fire GL 4000 is now fully compatible with DEC-Alpha systems, and a DM 2000 price reduction now makes this high-powered 3D performer an even greater value to professionals. Powered by the 3Dpro/2mp graphics chipset from Mitsubishi and a rendering processor based on Evans and Sutherland´s REALimage technology, Diamond Multimedia´s Fire GL 4000 delivers accelerated 3D and 2D for workstation level performance on the PC. By off-loading key functions from the CPU, the Fire GL 4000 eliminates common bottlenecks found in the 3D pipeline and is capable of processing up to two million polygons per second in real-time. The Fire GL 4000 offers API support for OpenGL and Autodesk´s Heidi when used in a Windows NT 4.0 environment. The Fire GL 4000 is equipped with 15 MB of high performance 3D-RAM graphics memory.

With its price now lowered to an extremely affordable DM 1650 (excluding VAT), the Fire GL 3000 is a single-slot, dual-screen graphics solution based on the GliNT 500TX texture processor and the GliNT Delta geometry setup engine from 3Dlabs. With 8MB of VRAM and up to 32MB of DRAM for texture mapping, the Fire GL 3000 allows graphics professionals to display their 3D creations over two monitors for heightened productivity. Other features include texture mapping, double-buffering and many other real-time 3D functions. Designed for use with Windows NT, the Fire GL 3000 is compatible with popular 3D applications such as 3D Studio MAX, Lightwave, AutoCAD, MicroStation and Pro/ENGINEER.

Designed for advanced 2D/3D performance for 3D multimedia presentations, CAD/CAM, web authoring, VRML and digital content creation, the Fire GL 1000 Pro is an entry-level professional graphics accelerator with fast 2D performance for use with business applications. This affordable (DM 450) yet powerful graphics subsystem is now available in AGP configurations, allowing textures used in 3D graphics to be accessed directly from system memory for even more realistic 3D performance. The Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro is powered by the Permedia 2 chipset from 3Dlabs, optimized for Windows NT and Windows 95 platforms and accelerates 3D performance for applications based on OpenGL, Direct3D and Heidi application programming interfaces (APIs). Featuring 8MB of 100MHz SGRAM, the Fire GL 1000 Pro is capable of processing up to one million texture-mapped polygons per second. In addition to an integrated geometry set up engine, the Fire GL 1000 Pro includes 3D features in hardware such as rasterization, texture mapping, double-buffering and 16-bit Z-buffering.