Diamond goes head to head against Nvidia

DIAMOND IS RETURNING to the scene of the crime. This manufacturer of professional (FireGL) and consumer (Monster 3D) series of graphics cards in the late 90s got bought by S3, and the management spun off FireGL division to ATI in early 2000s.

In the past several years, this company has crawled back into the market, and after releasing Viper 2900XT, only retail R600 board with 1GB of GDDR4 memory - Diamond is marking another first.

We learned of Diamond's plans to return to professional market in mid-July, but not with FireGL brand, a brand that originates from the company. Since other ATI partners are planning to license the FireGL name from AMD and go on the market, Diamond Multimedia decided to go on its own.

New series of professional graphics cards will be market VFX, with the new products coming to market in September. First product will be VFX 2000, board featuring full-fledged, R600GL GPU with 2GB of GDDR4 memory attached to the 512-bit memory controller. In FireGL naming convention, this model would be named V8650.

Judging by the results achieved by mainstream RV630GL chip (desktop version is known as HD 2600), which sometimes even rivals G80GL-based boards (something just unimaginable in desktop world, where HD2600 barely rivals 8600GTS), fully-fledged R600GL chip should demolish the competition.

A while ago, we have talked with architects of R600 GPU and the lads told us that the main strength of R600 chip is its configurability towards the task in hand. Professional applications require as much Vertex power as possible and R600 can completely convert its shader array of 320 scalar units (including 64 fatty ones).

Price tag is unknown to us at press time, but we know that FireGL V8650 should sell for 1300-1500 quids here in Blighty - we doubt Diamond will be far cheaper than that.

One thing is certain - AMD now has the golden opportunity to erode Graphzilla's iron grip in professional market. Nvidia holds 85% of the market, and this line-up definitely has potential to capture 20-30% of market. If it happens, it would mean wonderful news for AMD sales results, since this low-volume market comes with a massive 70-80% profit margin. µ