Manufacturer: Diamond Multimedia Tech: AGP based 3Dfx Banshee with 16Mb SGRAM Bundle: Unreal, Motocross Madness Price: $149

Back in August, Sharky Extreme tested an early version of what at that time was Diamond's first alpha card based on the 3Dfx Banshee chipset.

Even at that early stage of development we praised the alpha card's ability to push pixels, and deliver impressive performance, and we looked forward to testing the final product later in the fall.

Today we can finally write the 2nd half of the story on Diamond's Banshee card, and deliver our opinion on its competitiveness to both the rest of the Banshee-based cards available, and to the video card market in general. The "Fusion" is the subject of this review, and as you'll see, it's a helluva product.

First, lets give everyone the customary black and white low down spec-wise on the Fusion:

• 3Dfx Banshee Chipset
• AGP 1X Support
• 16MB of 125MHz SGRAM
• 250MHz RAMDAM
• Maximum Win95/98 Desktop resolution of 1920x1200x24bpp
• AVI and MPEG-1 Video Playback Support
• Both PCI and AGP versions available
• 3D Features include Anti-Aliasing, Trilinear Filtering, Bump Mapping, and Sub-Pixel Correction Accuracy
• APIs Supported: Glide, D3D, OpenGL