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

Trident 8900

[ergo98]

My firewall is blustering along using a ISA Trident 8900 : You can't fault them for making low quality products.

Having said that, this preview has no hardware, and hence no benchmarks or qualitative/quantitative reviews. This is nothing more than market fluff at this point.

Nothing wrong with a little competition...

[altgrr]

With ATI and Nvidia taking the lion's share of the market, but putting their main publicity on their top-end products, it wouldn't be unusual for a not-quite-so-high-end graphics chip to find its way into a lot of cheaper systems. If the performance is reasonable, I should think it'd be a welcome addition to the tiny Shuttle computers, for example.

Their Name

[scott1853]

I don't think they'll be able to live down the stigma associated with their company name. They probably should have come back under a different name to at least show that they've changed a little. It was such a disgrace having a trident card or built-in chipset in your computer back in the day.

Re:Their Name

[Fuyu]

Trident has always been known for their video cards that have been well liked by OEMs and your average consumer because of their budget prices.

From the article, "If you sliced the desktop graphics market into 4 different sectors ( $300) you'd realize that the largest volumes would be in the sub-$100 range, and that's exactly what Trident is targeting with their XP4."

Trident is going after the market where they can sell the most volume of video cards and if they can really deliver on 80% of the performance of a GeForce4 Ti 4600, it will be well worth it.

Good luck, they'll need it...

[sterno]

The graphics market boils down to two major markets:

1) OEM's
2) Gamers

Gamers will likely pay the premimum to get that extra 20% of performance. Also, the NVIDIA name carries a certain assurance that it's all going to work well.

As for OEM's, harder to say. One the one hand you've got some systems where the goal is being cheap and you go for an integrated chipset. Then on others the goal is best performance and thus the premium for 20% becomes worthwhile. There's a middle there, but I don't know how wide that middle is.

Class 90/10

[Anonymous Coward]

The taiwanese are very smart. Why spend billions on R&D when they can get 90% of the performance at 10% the cost? I believe the resurgence will be very noticeable this time, especially since companies like SiS (Xabre 400 chip - 90% performance of Ti 4200, 10% production cost) also make motherboard chipsets. Trident, being a long standing Taiwan chipmaker, probably has a natural advantage in striking deals to integrate their chip into m/b chipsets. This also explains why NVidia feels so compelled to make nForce. I think NVidia is smart enough to realize that these Taiwanese companies are a hell of a lot more stable and successful than they are, and that if they want to mirror tha success, they will have to also focus on integration to build product synergy and adoption.

Hey Idiots! They're trying to CHANGE!!!

[swordgeek]

This article has been up on /. for about two minutes, and almost every comment so far has been, "Well I had a card from them that sucked, so everything else they do will suck too."

Guess what? THOSE CARDS ARE YESTERDAY'S NEWS! Trident is making a different card with different chips and different circuits. They'll have different performance than the old cards!!!!

Now the new card is going to be cheap, which makes me suspicious of its performance/quality. However, discounting is out of hand because their last card (or even every card before this one) is completely pointless and wrong-headed. Look at the card, and then decide if it sucks. Amazing that so many of you have to be told that.

Lets also not forget that Trident did extremely well selling 'shite' cards. At one point there were more 8900 chips than any other single video chip in PCs at the time! Cheap, slow, but great where you just need a screen. (like my console server and my firewall, for instance)

So get over the past.

Is it too late?

[brejc8]

Begs the question if it really is too late to get into the 3D graphics biz.
I was at a presentations about asynchronous logic by a company who did some research into the area.
They took the advantage of fast and fine grain asynchronous pipelines but by then nvidia was in the market and they claim they had no chance copeating with them.
If trident can come out of the blue and make a card %80 of the speed of a gforce4 then maybe they and others gave up too early.

80% Performace for $100?

[sevensharpnine]

On a GeForce 4 4600 Quake 3 in 1024x768 32bit High Quality runs at 220 fps. (Source: Tom's Hardware VGA Charts.) Now, 80% of 220 = 176. A Geforce 3 (standard) runs the same benchmark at 173.8 - roughly 80%. A GeForce 3 can be had for $91 according to pricewatch. Granted, it may not have the same "DX9" support, but I'm sure it will run without any problems with DX9. In fact, I'm sure it will run any game on your local computer retailer's shelf. It will also run under Linux. It will also have new drivers released next year. It also works with your choice of virtually any AGP slotted motherboard being sold today. It will not cause random lockups because you bought a cheap NIC. It has flawless OpenGL AND Direct3D support. And any game manufacturer that produces a game that doesn't run under it will go out of business.

Don't get me wrong, I love market competition as much as anyone. I hope Trident can compete with Nvidia and ATI, but even if this PR bullshit proves true, they're still behind the curve as far as I can tell.