Ah Diamond. My first 3D card was a Diamond Stealth 2000 based upon S3 Virge3D chip. That was back in 1996 when video cards were just beginning to have 3D features. A few years later, Diamond was purchased by S3 Incorporated. S3 unfortunately had all kinds of fiscal and engineering problems and slowly got rid of its graphics divisions. Today, S3 is a part of VIA Technologies and the Diamond name is owned by Best Data Products.
2003 saw the return of Diamond Multimedia to the market place. The first press release from Diamond had them promise to deliver Stealth and Viper graphics cards based on chipsets from both NVIDIA and ATI. The first cards to come out of the new company were based upon ATI's X800 cards. Today Diamond has made a comeback with video cards on all of ATI's current chips and they will enter the sound card and other markets as well.
ATI launched their R520 series in October of last year. The X1800 was the first ATI card to fully support Shader Model 3.0 (Pixel and Vertex Shader 3.0). Unfortunately for ATI the X1800 was late, months after the original plan of summer 2005. This forced ATI to make a painful choice with their refresh of that card, the R580. They moved the launch of the X1900 series to January of 2006. Today I'm reviewing the Diamond X1900XTX card.
