Monday, Diamond Multimedia continues its Stealth and Viper series of PC graphics accelerators with two speedy processors.

　　For the high-end gamer, the Diamond Viper V770 will use the latest nVidia Riva TNT2 2D/3D processor. The card will give gamers full 32-bit rendering, 128-bit processing power, DirectX 6.0 and Open GL ICD support, 32 MB of SDRAM, AGP 2X/4X support, and a maximum screen resolution of 2048x1536. Features for the board include single-pass multitexturing, a 24-bit Z-buffer, an 8-bit stencil buffer, large texture support, bump mapping, trilinear and anisotropic filtering, and flat-panel support.

　　In a recent preview test conducted by GameSpot tech guru Loyd Case, the V770 running on beta drivers edged out a Voodoo3 at 166MHz in the 3D GameGauge: Voodoo3's 578.3 vs. the V770's 583.2. 3D WinBench numbers also placed the V770 above the Voodoo3 with a top score of 865 (the V3 scored 726).

　　The Viper V770 will retail for US$230 when it begins shipping this May.

　　For gamers with tighter budgets, the Stealth III S540 comes powered with S3's latest 128-bit 2D/3D Savage 4 graphics chip. The S540 will support AGP 2X/4X and up to 16MB of memory and will release to retailers for under $120 when it ships in May. Other features include a max resolution of 1920x1440, support for the Intel Pentium II and AMD K7, and an OpenGL ICD.

　　One feature unique to the S540 is hardware compatibility with DirectX S3 Texture Compression (S3TC). This compression technology stores 240MB of textures into only 64MB. The result is a photo-realistic environment that you have to see to believe. With many games, including Anachronox, Expendable, Half-Life, Quake III: Arena, Unreal, and Unreal Tournament, incorporating the technology, games are bound to take on a new level of beauty.

　　Both boards will ship with Diamond's suite, InControl Tools99. The new software allows users to customize D3D and OpenGL settings quickly by turning on and off features games may or may not use. The InControl interface also includes new tool tips that give new and old gamers explanations of complex graphic technology and its impact on particular games. When it releases, the software will come with several presets for popular games. For instance, if one of your games doesn't support fog mapping, you can turn it off and it may even add extra speed to your title. And instead of guessing, InControl will let users look at the frame rate gains or losses depending on their settings. To make sure all your settings are up to date, Diamond's AutoUpdate tool will analyze your system for other Diamond peripherals and will offer updated drivers and other software updates as they release, so searching for the latest drivers may be a thing of the past.

　　Another feature enabled with both cards will be a customized version of SoftDVD that allows users with DVD drives to play DVD movies. The S540's version of SoftDVD is customized with S3's DVD motion compensation feature in mind to allow users with slower systems to play back movies in higher quality.