Wave Issue 9705 3/14/97 Article 4-01

***Vsis, E&S and Diamond Announce 3DPro Based Product
by John Latta

A product based on the 3DPro/2mp chipset co-developed by Mitsubishi's
Vsis subsidiary and Evans & Sutherland, will be brought to market by
Diamond Multimedia as the Diamond Fire GL 4000. The card uses 3DRAM for
the frame buffer and CDRAM for texture storage. Due to ship in the
April/May time frame this card begins at $2995 for a 15MB 3D-RAM and
4MB CDRAM configuration and $3,395 for a 15MB 3DRAM and 16MB CDRAM
configuration. Users can purchase the CDRAM add-on module for $595 to
go from 4MB to 16MB. When it ships this card is expected to support
Heidi (3D Studio MAX), Pro/E (PTC) and Softimage. ViewPerf CDRS-03
performance of 23.8 was claimed and this compares to a $16,485 priced
Intergraph RealiZm Z13-GT at 29.6. In response to a question GLQuake
performance numbers were not available. Diamond will go direct for its
OEM sales and it is setting up a new VAR group to sell into the VAR
channel. Diamond will not use its traditional retail channel.