Trident Back From the Dead

FunkyMonkey writes "It seems that Trident is trying to pull a Matrox and resurrect themselves from the 3D video card grave yard. AnandTech posted a Trident XP4 Preview today that has some interesting information on Trident's latest stab at the graphics market. The company is claiming 80% the performance of the GeForce 4 TI 4600 at a price tag of less than $100 USD including DX 9 support. How? A 0.13 micron process and only 30 million transistors thanks to pipeline resource sharing. "

Comments

Not a DirectX 9 part

[wpmegee]

The Trident XP4 isn't a DirectX 9 part, as the headline says Trident claims that they have a DirectX 8.1 GPU. Anyway, even if it was DX9 compliant, it would only meet the Vertex Shader specs and not the pixel shader specs (2.0 is DX9, 1.4 for DX8.1).

For that matter, no current processor has the fill rate necessary to comply with the Pixel Shader 2.0 specs, except possibly the Radeon 9700, which isn't yet available for benchmarking.

And while the specs are good for an entry level part, count the number of launch partners-zero.

Re:Not a DirectX 9 part

[be-fan]

But the Radeon 9700 is available for benchmarking. Benchmarks are on the anandtech site.

A differing opinion.

[paganizer]

The newer "blade" series of trident cards support OpenGL, have Linux drivers, are relatively responsive, and CHEAP.
I've always liked Tridents, especially in comparison to S3; they work.
Not the power gaming card, but good for general performance on a budget.