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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. "
Actually,
Hercules is one of the biggest manufacturers of current video cards. They are using the latest nVidia (maybe not for long), ATi, and PowerVR chips in their boards. They were purchased by Guillimot a few year back and have been making some excellent products. In my opinion, they were the pioneers of high quality video boards when the nVidia GeForce series started to take off. Recent connections with ATi and PowerVR though have soured the nVidia relationship.
Cirrus Logic is currently making some of the best audio DSPs in the business. You can see (hear) their chips in the Turtle Beach Santa Cruz, Hercules Game Theatre XP, and a few others. Most operate on a dual chip DSP setup that allows a lot of control for audio spatialization, and their reference design for boards based on the CS4630 was designed with quality in mind. Currently, they also create DSPs for a lot of integrated devices, including portable MP3 and WMA players.
S3 on the other hand, still blows, and always will. "SIGHT! SOUND! AND SPEED!" They still have a lot of the cheap OEM integrated market, especially after being purchased by VIA Tech. But that still doesn't make the Savage series any more than pumped up S3 ViRGE chips. It remains to be seen how their Alpha Chrome and Savage XP chips hold up.
Trident has their ties with all sorts of markets... Most of which are video. This is not strictly PC based. Their chips are in HDTVs and small devices, among other things. They make decoders, display adapters, and other ICs for DVD players and every thing else.
You won't see them going anywhere any time soon. If they were exclusivly doing chips for PCs, then maybe, but that isn't the case.
I've got a low-cost laptop from HP (one of the 'build your own' from Circuit City); and it's got a Trident cyberBladeXP in it. I was going to wait a bit to hold out for a ATI chipset, but after doing some reading I figured I could make it work. It does. Sure, I had to throw X into vesa mode to use my whole screen, sure the default trident driver stinks up the room (badly), but Trident just opened the specs for the cyberbladeXP and there is now a "drop in" driver for X that is 2d accelerated (3d is being worked on); and it works great. It's "no frills," but then I wasn't getting this laptop to do serious gaming. Would I use a Trident Card in a gaming machine, only if I was taking some serious drugs that warped my mind, but for a simple workstation, sure; no prob. I too had a terrible card in the past from Trident, but they're trying to get better. Can we just give 'em a chance?
Oh, goody. I can't wait to see some next generation products from Hercules, Cirrus Logic, and S3.
I have an ISA VGA Trident Video Card in my Linux router. It has 256k of video memory, and let me tell you, when I used to use it on a Windows 2000 server, it used to take 5 seconds to redraw the page.
BUT, on a related note, it is still working, and has been working for almost 10 years straight. Much better than the Radeon that I bought 2 years ago, which has now been moved to by web server, because it only works half the time. Trident makes cards that may not be quick, but they are pretty cheap, and seem to last forever. Never had a problem with one. If I'm looking for a video card for a server, I don't want to have to spend $60-80 on an ATI card. I want a $30 Trident card.
Well, everybody seems to be bashing the snot out of Trident the company, so I'll probably just get buried in the noise. But... a few years back, when sound cards were a genuine pain in the ass to support under Linux, Trident Microsystems was one of the few to release complete details of their chipset (4DWave DX/NX), and even wrote and donated an open source driver to the ALSA project. So, maybe their video cards weren't as perfect as you all seem to want, but you need to quit slamming the company. Because in fact, they were one of the early "good guys" with Linux.
Based on that experience, I'll probably buy the video card. So long as it includes a Linux driver.
I hardly think Matrox comparing Matrox to Trident is very fair. Matrox did not "come back from the dead" with the Parhelia, they just attempted to compete in the gaming market. While they did not release a Ti4600 killer, the Parhelia did introduce a number of innovative features. But G-series cards have been quite successful for the past few years in the workstation and financial markets with Matrox's excellent dual-head capabilities. Trident on the otherhand hasn't released a competitive card on any level in many years, so this announcement is in fact a resurrection of sorts.
In my laptop, a toshiba tecra 8200 is a trident cyberblade xp gfx chipset. Trident has not beeing willing to provide specs. or anything else so that the Xfree people can provide us with drivers. I feel very bad about Trident and will never buy another product from them again. Please do not support such companies and buy products like Ati, which have a good relationship with the Xfree people.
ATI, Matrox, Trident - I'm waiting...
I was waiting too until I got sick of it and got a GF4 4200 128MB. Yes, the drivers are closed source but they are fully featured and work *fine*. Sure beats my friend's Radeon 8500 open source driver which still doesn't support half of the things the card is capable of. How long does he have to wait to get the full support for the hardware he bought 6 months ago? ATI is cheap and lame - they think they only have to open the specs for the card while the Weather Channel pays for the driver development. I mean the Radeaon 9700 will cost $400. For that kind of money I bloody well expect a shiny new Linux driver.
mczak
Linux - ISA Trident card
Amiga - (Paula, Fat Agnus and Denise - OCS)
Win311 - PCI Trident Card (1 meg memory, yes!)
Win95 - S3 Virge (de-cellerator, Came with OEMed Decent)
Win98 - Nvidia TNT 8 megs (Diamond MM)
Win98SE - Dual Voodoo2's and Nvidia TNT (DMM)
Win98SE - Dual Voodoo2's and Nvidia TNT2 (DMM)
Win98SE - Geforce 1 (DMM)
Win2K - Geforce 256 (Asus)
Win2K - Geforce 2MX (Asus)
WinXP - Geforce 3 Ti500 (Asus)
Linux Box - PCI Trident (8 meg)
Linux Box2 - S3 Savage AGP (16 meg)
I remember looking at video cards for some unix boxes, the 2 choices for a cheap card for a long time was Jaton branded pci cards(Trident chips) or Cirus video cards. I tried to go with jaton, the trident chips always had good opensource drivers. I still try to get trident videos card for linux boxes I build, but they are harder to find at local wholesale stores.
The only card I never used, which I heard had great linux support was any Matrox cards, the prices were just to high, and always slower than the others for games.
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Do you DirectVNC?
I liked the Trident 8900 ISA and 9200/9400 VLB cards -- they weren't the fastest but they were rock-stable and the drivers were well-behaved, AND they have a really nice legible screen font, ideal for console use. They're still my card of choice for ISA/VLB systems (yes, I still support some and even own some).
But I've been gravely disappointed by every PCI/AGP Trident-based card I've seen. Slow as molasses, and the AGP cards have a shit screen font (apparently pilfered from an old Diamond chip). OTOH they do still get along with everything, and they're VERY cheap ($8.00!!), so I use 'em for testing hardware and for "anything that outputs a video signal will do" situations.
In short -- good points: cheap, stable, well-behaved, drivers always available, PCIs and earlier have a really good screen font; bad points: PCI and AGP are both slow as mud (MUCH slower than the claims typically printed on the box), *no* VESA 2.0 support in hardware (so can't do hires outside of Win32), AGP models have a horrible screen font.
But when I went to Trident's site to get information on one of the newer cards, I was presented with a long disclaimer which boiled down to: "Trident only makes CHIPS. Trident has NEVER made *video cards*, ever, period. We only supply drivers as a convenience to you. Don't ask us about any video cards, they're not our fault, we didn't make them, and we don't support them!!"
After reading that, I wrote Trident sales and tech support to this effect: "In that case, you'd better keep an eye on who you supply chips to, because these uniformly-awful recent Trident-based cards are giving Trident a bad name." (No response.)
Anyway.. since Trident disclaims making anything but chips -- my question is WHO IS MAKING THE "TRIDENT" CARDS??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?