Review AGP Graphic Cards

Diamond Fire GL 1000 Pro - The Professional With A Heart For Gamers

The Fire GL 1000 Pro came to me with a new chip revision and was equipped with 8 MB SGRAM. This new revision showed considerably improved performance under Direct3D, resulting in a 3D Winmark of 201. This gets the 3D performance of this card pretty close to the very fast and very successful 3Dfx 3D add on cards. The Fire GL 1000 Pro uses the new 'Permedia 2' chip from 3D labs, which offers a high 2D, a high 3D and a good OpenGL performance, making the card pretty interesting for gamers as well as for people that use their system under NT as OpenGL workstation. The Windows 95 performance is good, but could certainly be better with future drivers, as the excellent Windows NT performance shows very well. Under Windows NT this card is the current number one, offering an amazing 2D performance and a good OpenGL performance on top of it. If you are using your system as graphic workstation this card is the right choice. The 3D picture quality is not as good as what the NVidia Riva 128 or 3Dfx Voodoo is offering, problems with the 'Dithering' are the reason for it. Future drivers may solve this problem so that this card will even get very interesting for gamers in case they want a good 2D performance as well. The Fire GL 1000 Pro was actually developed by Diamond Germany and the 8 MB version will be cheaper than the Millennium 2 w/ 8 MB as well as the Revolution 3D.

MotoRacer on the Fire GL 1000 Pro. The 3D performance is fine for running this game, but the problem with dithering make the picture look ugly compared to the Riva 128 card. Please note the black smoke from the bike's wheel, which is supposed to be white as you can see below.