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You'll notice there's no mention of DVD support, or any type of TV-Out for that matter, and that's with good reason.......There is none. This isn't a knock against just the Fusion, as it seems that all of the current Banshee-based cards on the market don't offer hardware motion compensation for DVD or any kind of video-out option for large-screen gaming. This was a choice made by 3Dfx, as their last Banshee reference card provided to their OEM vendors in late August (Diamond, STB, Creative, and others) was missing the Chrontel chip that had been on the reference card in previous versions. The Chrontel chips provide almost any video card with the ability to throw the display image out to a standard television, and have been used throughout 1997 and 98 to achieve that goal.
As far as the lack of the DVD-necessary motion compensation ability, that's also a 3Dfx-guilty issue. The Banshee simply doesn't have this feature built into the chip, and DVD-hopefuls will have to wait for 3Dfx's "in development" 2D/3D chipset next year if they refuse to buy another competitor's product.
One hardware feature that's unique to the Diamond Fusion versus any other Banshee card, is the heatsink/fan that's mounted on the Banshee chip. Diamond wisely decided to put a little moola into their Banshee part, and it shows. The cooling fan not only adds to system stability, it allows for a performance increase when combined with the higher quality 125MHz SGRAM that the Fusion includes.
These are no small gifts to Fusion buyers from Diamond, as the benchmarks indicate. We'll say it loud and clear right now in one easy to understand sentence:
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