Diamond Multimedia today rolled out its new Stealth III S540 Xtreme AGP graphics accelerator, based on the S3's Savage4 Xtreme chip and featuring the chip company's texture compression technology. The card will be sold at retail for less than $130.00 in the US, and begin shipping in September, the company said. It features 128-bit processing, 166MHz memory clock and engine clock speeds, AGP 4x downward compatible technology and 32MB of SDRAM memory "for amazing graphics performance", the company gushed. With S3's hardware texture compression will enable the card to store 240MB of textures in 64MB of system memory, and support resolutions up to 2048x2048. Capabilities will include single-pass multi-texturing, 32-bit rendering and stencil buffering. In addition, second-generation motion compensation and sub-picture alpha blending enables the Stealth III S540 Xtreme to provide hardware-accelerated DVD playback with Diamond's bundled DVD player application. The Savage4 Xtreme is "the ultimate price/performance solution for the value segment of the PC graphics market", according to Michael Buchanan, S3's director of desktop marketing. "Based on this competitive advantage, Diamond's Stealth III S540 Xtreme is an optimal solution for consumers who want higher performing productivity applications, faster 3D games and more graphically intense Internet browsing." In other words, a video Celeron. ®