Diamond Monster 3D II - More Than a Worthy Successor

Disclaimer

The Diamond Monster 3D II, which I received directly from Diamond's Vice President Corporate Marketing and the European Marketing Manager is at final beta state. The main difference to the final board is that the memory runs at only 83 MHz instead of 90 MHz clock. The results of the final board will be even a bit higher. The here published results are neither wrong nor misleading, the 3D performance of the Monster 3D II will be higher than of any currently available 3D card, which can already be seen by the published results.

All information stating that the tested hardware would be alpha state is incorrect as well as the information that Diamond disagreed with the testing of this board. The opposite is the case and can be found out directly from Diamond's PR department.

After the literally cool Diamond Monster Party (at freezing 4 degrees centigrade) in Paris on January 29, 1998, I was lucky enough to be one of the few that returned home with a Monster 3D II in my hand luggage. As 99% of you will certainly know, this new 3D add-on board comes with nothing less than the eagerly awaited Voodoo2 chip from 3Dfx, which is supposed to show the rest of the 3D chip manufacturers what 3D acceleration is really about.

I never really covered 3Dfx' Voodoo2 chip here on my site, because you could find lots of information about this amazing new 3D chip all over the net and I prefer not copying or rehashing other people's stuff, since this is done to myself to an extend that's annoying enough already. Nevertheless will I now try to summarize the most important features of Voodoo2 in short: