"Remember that a majority of the drivers for Diamond's video cards were included with Windows 95 on the CD. The drivers that came from Hercules and #9 were based on the OEM chip driver. They were very slow. They use OEM video chips and silk screen their name on the boards and include some neat utilities."
Your understanding of Windows 95 driver development history is
incorrect. The same S3 drivers were labelled Diamond, Hercules, #9,
etc. when included on the original Windows 95 CD-ROM, but they were all aliases to the same OEM drivers.
All the graphics card vendors heard the starting gun at the same time. Diamond was virtually the last major vendor to come out with their own accelerated drivers, and even when they did, they weren't faster than the #9 and Hercules offerings, which came out literally months before those of Diamond's. Diamond could have been right up there with #9, Hercules, STB and the rest, but they chose a different set of priorities.
Remember, Diamond had an team of engineers at Redmond several weeks prior to their first driver release. Matrox and ATI did not have any advantages over Diamond.
I'm not saying that Diamond has incompetent engineers; simply that they Diamond has a different agenda than do some other vendors.
"Diamond was slow in putting out 'accelerated' drivers because they had to relearn how to code to a new specification. They had to wait until Direct X was close to being Gold and/or wait for an OEM Direct X compatible driver to modify. "
This is the *excuse* that Diamond technical support reps were instructed to use on online forums and elsewhere. They unfairly laid
the blame on Microsoft and a lot of people bought it. There was nothing preventing Diamond from releasing accelerated display drivers before DirectDraw was released by Microsoft -- other vendors went ahead and did just that, and when DirectDraw was released, these vendors released their second-generation drivers while Diamond was still working on their first.
The funny thing is that the Diamond support reps were still using the
"we're waiting for Microsoft" phrase for weeks after DirectDraw had dropped to all the vendors. Since Windows 95 itself was subject to long delays and many people feel comfortable with picturing Microsoft as a bunch of evil weenies, this excuse fooled a lot of intelligent people. For all I know, Diamond is still blaming Microsoft for the lack of Direct3D drivers on their Edge series.
Rolf |
