3d ride

Diamond Multimedia is a company that specializes in many forms of multimedia technology. They have produced graphics cards, modems, sound cards and MP3 players. They were one of the major players in the 2D and early 3D graphics card competition throughout the 1990s and early 2000s.

Diamond Multimedia was merged (after a long-time companionship) with S3 Graphics in 1999. The merger was mostly due to S3's willingness to expand their trade from simply producing graphics chipsets to retail graphics cards. The act is somewhat similar with the 1999 3dfx purchase of STB Technologies. LX. The merger was hoped to boost the company's overall capabilities by combining the resources of S3 and Diamond, who were quite close partners over the preceding years. Unfortunately things did not go so well. The greatly anticipated S3 Savage 2000 was a failure, and the excitedly growing 3D sound card market nearly fell apart with the loss of Aureal Semiconductor.

With these market failures, the new combined Diamond/S3 company decided to change direction and leave the PC addon-board market. SONICblue was formed. Diamond Multimedia resurfaced in 2003 after the brand and assets had been purchased by Best Data. LX 4 x 4 - 3D. Diamond again built expansion boards.

Graphics Cards

Speedstar

Diamond's earliest line, now defunct, was the Speedstar series. The line typically consisted of the cheaper, value-oriented chips in low-cost implementations.

Early on, popular chips on Speedstars were Cirrus Logic graphics solutions. They were good performers in their market segment, besting offerings from Trident Microsystems and others in many cases.