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

Re:Who's next?

[13Echo]

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.

This is the same Trident

[r_j_prahad]

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.

Yeah, but who really makes the *cards*??

[Reziac]

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??