Diamond Multimedia Systems Inc. has introduced the Diamond Fire GL1, the first 256-bit engine for the NT workstation market.

The $995 Diamond Fire GL1 is optimized for multi-processor systems with multi-threaded OpenGL drivers and supports Intel's new Pentium III Streaming SIMD Extensions.

Diamond claims the Fire GL1 accelerator can deliver up to 15 million anti-aliased vectors per second sustained and processes 200 million pixels per second fill rate. Featuring the IBM 256-bit graphics rasterizer, the GL1 provides twice the bandwidth of standard 128-bit engines to deliver faster 2D and 3D graphics performance. With an integrated 250MHz RAMDAC, the Diamond Fire GL1 accelerator supports True Color screen resolutions up to 1920-by-1200 with double buffering and a 24-bit Z-buffer.

For details, visit the company's web site at http://www.diamondmm.com .