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The first type of S3 ViRGE cards to appear. Many brands sold S3-based cards and Diamond was one of them.

ViRGE stands for Video and Rendering Graphics Engine. Basically the ViRGE is based on the Trio64+ 2D core with added 3D functions. Don't expect too much of these 3D functions because driver-implementations aren't that good and performance is sub-par. Nevertheless a few games managed to get support for the S3D API and gained image quality and performance. Back in the day I used to play Tomb Raider with the S3 patch which ran a lot better than the vanilla SVGA version.

Personally I'd like to use S3 ViRGE's in 1996-1997 era PC's that run either DOS games or early Win'95 games. It's stable and very compatible with 2D DOS games. If you pair the S3 ViRGE with a Voodoo Graphics or Voodoo 2 you can run early 3D-accelerated games as well.

The Diamond Stealth 2000 is available in various revisions but performance-wise I guess they are all identical. Some cards have memory sockets to expand memory to 4MB but in it's class 2MB is just fine. 4MB doesn't give you better performance with this card.

This card is, within Diamond's line-up, succeeded by the Diamond Stealth 3D 2000 Pro which is based on the 86C375 (so called S3 Virge DX) running at 72MHz rather than 55MHz. > Read more

Not much to tell about this card since I haven't tested it yet. All I know it that it has two S3 Virge 86C325 chipsets on-board and offers quad-display setups.

Also note that you need a special cable to connect the monitors. Without the cable the card is practically useless. > Read more