Growth in the add-on sound card market, also an ongoing Diamond business, was tempered by the 2000 bankruptcy of Aureal Semiconductor and subsequent asset purchase by vertically integrated Creative Technologies.

[1] Diamond's earliest line, now defunct, was the SpeedStar series, initially based on the Tseng Labs ET4000AX chipset, and expanded further in additional releases.

The SpeedStar line was launched as a series of high-performance ISA graphics cards that excelled in MS-DOS applications up through the early 1990s.

Partial listing of Speedstar-branded models The Stealth cards of the 2D era were first launched in the early 1990s and were usually based on GUI accelerators from S3 Graphics.

The Diamond Stealth II S220, using the Rendition Verite V2100 2D/3D accelerator, was popular with enthusiasts for its excellent price/performance for both 2D and 3D gaming.

A special BIOS patch was released by Diamond for the Stealth II S220 which brought its clock speed up to the same level as the high-end Verite V2200 chip, resulting in equal performance at a significantly lower price.

Partial listing of Stealth-branded models The Diamond Edge 3D was the first consumer 3D accelerator card, based on the NVIDIA NV1 chipset.

The architecture of the NV1 predates the Microsoft Direct3D philosophy and, as such, game compatibility was a problem with the Diamond Edge boards.

The audio engine further received poor reviews regarding MIDI quality, which was a common standard for multimedia music playback at the time.

In SLI, a pair of Voodoo2 boards splits the effort of rendering the 3D scene between alternating raster lines, allowing performance to be nearly doubled.

For non-GUI environments such as DOS, the original Viper used an Oak Technology OTI-087 display chip with its own 256 KB DRAM.

For GUI environments such as Windows, the Viper cards used a Weitek graphics co-processor which accelerated many drawing functions and performed very well for its time.

Partial listing of Viper-branded boards The name "FireGL" stands for Diamond's workstation-class 2D/3D graphics cards.

This brand was originally created decades ago as just "Fire" by the design team of the professional computer graphics pioneer SPEA Software AG from Starnberg (Germany) that was acquired by Diamond in 1995.

Products whilst under the hood of Diamond were: The FireGL team was bought by ATI (later AMD) in 2001 once the combined Diamond/S3 dropped out of the graphics market to form SONICblue.

As of September 2007, thus long after that business, Diamond was also preparing a new video card, based on the latest-generation R600 graphics core.

Diamond altered the PCB reference design and labeled their device VFX 2000 series professional workstation graphics card.

[8] The Monster Sound cards were the first to support hardware mixing acceleration with Microsoft's new DirectSound and DirectSound3D audio APIs.

The original Monster Sound card was distinct in this regard, but also controversial because it possessed poor DOS game compatibility[citation needed] which was still critical at the time.

Whereas the MonsterSound lineup was targeted at no-holds-barred gamers, the Sonic Impact cards were more generally aimed, and were cheaper and less powerful.

The brand has a lineage going back to Supra, Inc. Diamond began manufacturing PC-compatible motherboards after purchasing Micronics Computers in 1998.

These kits bundled a 'feature reduced' (several pin headers and other parts not installed) full length PCI MPEG2 analog overlay decoder card made by division.