14 DAY TRIAL // Diamond Multimedia is a well-known and liked hardware manufacturing company in the United States which focuses itself on high-end graphics cards targeted at gamers and related multimedia products. After years of developing both gaming and professional graphics cards, the company retired from the professional market and concentrated exclusively on the gaming and multimedia businesses.
Now, it looks like the Diamond company is back on the professional graphics cards market with a new product, this time, unlike past solutions, centered around a graphics chip made by the AMD's graphics division ATI. There is information that Diamond Multimedia plans to enter the United States graphics market with a new line of VFX 2000 products and according to the news site xbitlabs, the flagship of this new line of graphics cards will be the Diamond VFX 2000, possibly based on a rebranded ATI FireGL V8650. Featuring an ATI R600 graphics processing unit with 320 unified shader processors and no less than 2GB of dedicated GDDR4 video memory running at a standard clock frequency of 2GHz, the new Diamond product is intended solely for high-end graphics professionals activating on the digital content creating field and similar markets. Its price tag, while affordable for such a field comes like a little shock for most computer users: $2799.
The well known FireGL brand of professional graphics card solutions from ATI and now AMD is in fact a brand developed and released by the Diamond Multimedia company in the period when the manufacturer was producing cards based on video processing units made by IBM and 3DLabs. The FireGL brand and other assets were acquired by ATI Technologies in 2001 after the Diamond Multimedia company became a part of S3 Graphics and since then the new owner did not permit third party hardware manufacturers to sell graphics cards under that brand. Until recently the only way to acquire a FireGL professional graphics card was to buy one from ATI but since the graphics manufacturer was transformed into one of AMD's divisions, the new owner decided that the respective policy was unprofitable. Now, Sapphire Technology has a line of FireGL professional graphics solutions and AMD hopes that this move will stop its market share from eroding any further as it's rival on the graphics cards market Nvidia has a much more varied line of Quadro family of professional graphics boards.