In order to hit a targeted street price of just $100 - $120 with the Stealth III, Diamond looked to S3's Savage4Pro video accelerator chip.

Priced at just $22 in 10K unit blocks the Savage4Pro checks in roughly 40% cheaper in price compared to the more expensive chips being offered by nVidia's current high end. Clocked at a core speed of 125MHz and a SDRAM speed of 143MHz, the Savage4Pro brings the necessary level of performance to the table to be considered for a Diamond Multimedia graphics product.

If price and performance alone weren't incentive enough, Diamond also turned to the Savage4 do to the unexpected move by 3dfx of acquiring video card manufacturer STB late last year. This move eliminated the Voodoo3-2000 chip from possibly propelling the Stealth III or rival cards from other manufacturers like Creative and Hercules.

With the Savage4 selected as the engine for the Stealth III, Diamond next moved to choose which features they would include or eliminate in the rest of the Stealth III's make up. LCD support was quickly eliminated from consideration, as was a TV-Out port. These choices were made in order to allow the Stealth III to be equipped with 32MB of SDRAM while still keeping the price of the card within the target range.

Here are the rest of the Stealth III's detailed specifications:

Controller:

S3 Savage4 Pro

128-bit 2D, 3D and video

Bus Type:

AGP 4X (Compatible with AGP 1X/2X)

Memory:

32MB SDRAM

Capable of achieving memory clock speeds of 143MHz

Horizontal Sync Signals:

31.5KHz-112.0KHz

Vertical Refresh:

60Hz-200Hz

Maximum Dot (Pixel) Rate:

300MHz RAMDAC

Monitors Supported:

Standard and Multi-frequency Analog Monitors

DDC2B Plug and Play

Video Playback:

AVI and MPEG-1

DVD/MPEG-2 requires DVD ROM Drive

Motion compensation

X and Y interpolation

Color space conversion

Connectors:

DB-15 analog monitor connector (VESA DDC2B)

Complete 3D Feature Set:

8-bit Stencil Buffer

32-bit Rendering

Anisotropic filtering

Backface Culling

Bilinear MIP Mapping

Bump Mapping

Floating Point Z-Buffer

Full Scene Anti-Aliasing

Gouraud Shading

Integer Z-Buffer Multi-Texture Blending

MPEG-2 Video Textures

Perspective Correction

Ramp Mode Rendering

Reflection Mapping

Single-Pass Bump Mapping

Single-Pass Multi-Texture Blending

Strips and Fans

Texture Cache

Texture Compression

Tri-linear MIP Mapping

Up to 24-bit Z-Buffer

Variable Length Vertex Parsing

Vertex Cache

W-Buffer

API Support

DirectX 6.1, OpenGL ICD

Minimum System Configuration

Intel Pentium® 90 or compatible CPU

AGP 1.0 or 2.0 compliant slot

8MB system memory

Windows 95 OSR 2.1, Windows 98 or Windows NT 4.0 with Service Pack 3 (Service Pack 4 or higher recommended)

CD-ROM or DVD-ROM drive