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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. "
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.
another cheap videocard that promises a level of performance it cannot acheive.
The last time I saw trident was on a Packed Bell computer, if thats any indication of quality.
I would *not* recommend Trident to anybody who is in the market. It is sugary and rots your effing teeth right out of your god damn mouth. I would instead go with Wrigley's Extra instead. Also Wrigley is a very moral company and they named the baseball field in Chicago. Please to be thanking you.
We had a Trident card in the first 486 (SX33!) we had, and I remember thinking that I could probably get a faster display using Trident Gum...
Hope they've changed things a bit.
Karma: Marginal (mostly due to the border around the website)
Stay dead, you evil bastard! Stay dead!!!
*ahem*
Yes, sir. I ownded a Trident, too.
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.
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.
Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
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.
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.
This sig has been temporarily disconnected or is no longer in service
1. Make card slower than competition 2. Charge less little for it 3. ....
4. Profit!
Our card is slower than theirs but you should use it anyway!
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.
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.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
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.
Mouse powered Chips, Open source Processors and Lego
Usually in these situations, the marketing dept. designed the spec's for a less than wonderful implementation by the tech dept resulting in the usual h/w crud where we cringe at the mention of their name - cyrix, celeron, early AMD, Acer CDROM's, hellokitty, etc...
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.
I wish this ghost of the past would've stayed where it belongs.. Like, in the past, and inside one of my firewall machines.
..And miraculously, it still works! I mean, my first 3D-accelerated card, with a RIVA128 chip, went FUBAR in a couple of years. I've seen lots of other cards too, that haven't stayed for as long as this Trident not-quite-a-nuclear-missile did.
I, for one also, had a Trident 8900 board in my oldie 486 computer, and boy did it suck. It was so slow and disgusting and, and..
Perhaps it's the fact that it's a big and ugly ISA card, designed with no hurry in mind, unlike those overclocked and packed 3D-miracles we have today.. But I am still a bit astonished it's actually working without any errors, and the picture is still a solid square.
But please, for the love of 3D gamers, stay dead, will ya?
__
Zarathustra.fi
Modern man has no goal, no aim, no ideals.
Actually, I wish they would stay dead.
There was nothing less fun than having to find OEM Trident drivers for a crappy Windows 95A desktop.
Good lord how we hated on the board Trident video.
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?
I'd actually *like* to be able to buy a whipping cool card for $100. And it's quite plausible that Trident will be able to deliver (after all, they've stopped doing ISA cards ages ago).
The real potential problems with this: driver compatilibity and Linux support. If their drivers turn out sucky, well, *DUH*. And if they remain tight-lipped about their 'intellectual property', they'd better release decently performing DRI drivers.
--
I refuse to use
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.
Why, yes, I AM a Pagan Libertarian.
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.
Are there fatal flaws with NVidia and ATI's offerings? Why else the resurrection of these other companies? Is it because NVidia and ATI are getting monopoly rents?
Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
For me, the stigma is not with the name but their support. I got a company laptop with a trident card. need i say more? i will anyway, no driver support under linux. so no X. no more trident for me. what's even worse is that there is a third part driver but has a small quirk (intermittantly types in multiple chars when i hit a key) trident could have just helped this guy fix the driver. but guess not. they want to keep their IP to themselves. they can keep their video cards to themselves too.
I don't know - hard core gamers, granted, spend all the money they make working at Taco Bell on a new $450 vid card every 4 months.
However, there are a lot of the rest of us who don't want to drop that kind of cash, who cant tell the difference between 100 fps and 140 fps, and who would have to look a while to tell the difference between 24 bit and 32 bit graphics. We are NOT the people who buy games at midnight the day they come out, dressed up as a damned orc (yeah, you WC III freaks, that's you) or some Jedi retard for Outcast. We even wait until the games come down from $50 to buy them.
There are a lot of people like that. Check it out - NVIDIA is still selling the shit out of the Ti 4200, and even GF III's. There is a market there, and while I don't trust Trident, I will be buying a $150-$200 GeForce in a few months - to replace my, ahem, TNT2. *duck*
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
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.
"God is a comedian playing to an audience too afraid to laugh." -Voltaire
Yeah but whoever is serving the banners can get good data on what IPs have the most reloads on anti-microsoft stories.
And I'm sure MSFT could do something with that information. Maybe they could find out which company has the most anti-MSFT slashdot readers and send the executives of that company on a nice MSFT-sponsored vacation and then start hawking Visual Studio .NET to them.
Seriously, you just proved his point.
Companies aren't genetically pre-disposed toward a course of action. They weren't abused when they were young and are therefore more likely to settle into that same pattern.
Companies have not been subjected to rigorous Pavlovian testing (hear the bell ring and produce a low-end graphics chipset!). While they may occasionally be stricken with poor management, they can, and do, change.
--
Meanwhile, back at the site, ACs were posting for no reason.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
"I bet I'll get blamed for this." --Mayor Quimby
I never had a problem w/ the Virge line (well, other than their multihead non-friendlyiness). It got the job done for ~$25.
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
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.
Now that several companies are producing OpenGL hardware that is somewhat comparable to NVIDIA's, all it's going to take for me to switch is for one of them to have a completely open-source driver. I am tired of recompiling NVIDIA's driver manually for every kernel update, waiting for updates from them, and forget any platforms other than x86 and ia64...
Cards are so fast these days, I'd gladly sacrifice a 25-50% performance edge for the portability and reliability advantages of an open-source driver. ATI, Matrox, Trident - I'm waiting...
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.
When you want to convert, go to where the sinners are.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
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.
Especially over ATi and nVidia offerings. Maybe the Same OEMs that offer computers built with Cyrix CPUs, yea. :)
I've been looking for a video card that doesn't put out more heat than the rest of the computer.
At 0.13 micron and with the low transistor count they advertise, maybe this will be it.
If it's 90% as fast as a GeForce4, and puts out a lot less heat, I'm there.
I'll wait for reviews and drivers to see.
Jon Acheson
All opinions expressed herein are my own, and not those of my employers, who are appalled.
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.
-
Do you DirectVNC?
First of all back in the 486 days all of the BTO mom and pop shops bought Trident cards like they were going out of style. Then along came PCI and they continued that but the cards were relatively the same performamce. Then along came AGP and the Trident 3DImage. We used to sell those because they had TV out. Well I'll tell you one thing.. Such atrocities done to 3D should not be expanded to 52" for all to see! That was the last I had heard of Trident until the IOpener came along and people were hacking them to load Linux. Cyberblade... Sounded cool until I found out it was basically a reworked 3DImage chipset. Yet for whatever reason HP and Compaq were all over it like flies on..... It seemed to be a popular choice in their laptops. Especially their K6 and mobile Athlon/Duron models.
Now lets look at the compeditors at the time. 1998 had seen the introdcution of the Intel i740 low cost graphics chip. We could get these things in bulk for about $35-40 with 8MB ram. And compared to the 3DImage and the other option, the VirgeGX they kicked ass. (My boss was a cheapo and always wanted the cheapest card possible in his systems). At the time the video card options were basically Nvidia RivaZX, Rage Pro Turbo, and Permedia2. The high end market was served by the just introduced TNT and the Voodoo2. The i740 offered better graphics quality as the Rage Pro cards but cheaper. Trident didn't have a chance, so they slowly pulled back into their turtle shell.
Personally I'm hoping that this card will be everything it was hyped to be. It will force everyone to be bigger/better and cheaper. So I say "Good luck, and God speed!"
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?
I'm actually using a Geforce2MX DH Pro, that has dual-head built in. That's on my main system. I couldn't tell you what video cards are on my servers. SSH...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
I seem to remember a few hacks to programs running on C64s that would do exactly that...they would borrow the video memory and use it as system memory if you didn't have enough to run whatever it was you wanted to run.
If you could deal with the bottom or top third of video fscked up, you just scored a few K of free memory.
Geek used to be a four letter word. Now it's a six-figure one.
May the humorless pieces of shit who modded that down burn in hell. And this is my troll ID, so bring it on.
Call (206) 338-5780 COLLECT for information about a genuine BA, BS, MA, MS, MBA, or Ph.D.
Actually, if you read the article, what it is is numbers disguised as percents. They did the benchmarks, they compared the numbers to the numbers the other cards got on the benchmarks, then they posted the percentage. They even state that if you want a VERY close approximation of the real numbers they got, to apply the percents to the GF4 review numbers they have listed in other reviews.
I notice a lot of discussion about DirectX 8.1 and DX9 support (or lack thereof), but what about OpenGL? What version of OpenGL is Trident buying into with this new chip (1.2/3/4 2.0)? Which shader programmer will they support? Will they have their own extensions? If they are trying to get into the sub-$100 market, OpenGL becomes important since many low-end systems are used for non-Windows OSes.
More than once reading through the comments here I was on verge of puking.
You guys are so 133t.. At least you think you are.
Just face it. You are not the target of Trident, continue to spend $450 on card just so you can get a zillion fps in the newest, hottest game. The rest of us don't care.
If you read the article on Anandtech, you will see that it is not geared towards the high end gaming market. It is aimed towards Joe User who buys a couple of games a year, who like to see a couple of pr0n movies in high quality (or pictures). The only platform they really need to have a driver for is Windows. Linux (or rather XFree86) is unimportant. The market volumes are not in Linux, it is in OEM manufactured PC's running Windows Xp Home edition. Like it or not, but that is the cold, hard facts.
I have actually emailed Trident today to ask about drivers for XFree86 because it is a card I would consider putting into my Linux box to replace my old Voodoo 3dfx. I also need a new card for my Windows box, but I haven't decided what or when to buy yet, as I have a feeling we will see even more new high-end cards later this year. Given the right price/performance, I might buy a high-end card even though I do not need it. All the games I play work very well with my current hardware, but I see it is starting to show it's age, hence plans to buy a new card. (But then again, I also want to buy a new PC, bigger hard drive (200GB), DVD burner...)
If you mod me down, I *will* introduce you to my sister!
I have a Trident Cyberblade/XP in my laptop. The 2D acceleration is decent, but I haven't been able to find any 3D acceleration. It's also a little disappointing that the 2D acceleration is closed-source/NDA. If I could swap out a laptop video card, I would have long ago.
Citizens Against Plate Tectonics
Thats all I can say.....
Those numbers were also based on a pre-production card, so should not be taken as reflective of
benchmarks from a full retail release product.
ATI has also released a newer (supposedly faster)
version of thier catalyst drivers in the interim.
Which may have additional impact on the performance of the cards once the popular review
sites get actual, testable, cards to make use of.
hopefully, they'll focus on Linux compatibility. I don't need a bunch of flashy crap, i need an affordable card that can handle WindowMaker or KDE at 1024 or higher without being unstable if I swap back and forth to my virtual consoles. Riva TNT2 Ultra, as nice as it is for Half-Life on Win98, just doesn't offer me the same stability that my tried-and-true ISA Trident cards do (and that I still use in most of my boxes). And when it comes to servers, give me an antique Trident any day. Fortunately, affordability seems to be something they do have in mind...I just wish they'd come out with something that isn't trying to compete and put it out at sub-$50 levels so I can use a more stable card in my non-ISA boxen. Especially with how NVidia cards are with AMD's processors...
In SOVIET RUSSIA... erm...NSA AMERICA, the Internet logs onto YOU!
Look, for someone like me, this would be a nice thing. I right now have a 32 meg Diamond Viper II card...it barely runs Unreal Tournament. hell, it wont even run most other things, This card is cheap as hell and promises basically a Ti card. I'd buy it. I sure as hell would.
If trident didn't have such a bad reputation for reliability (they stink fyo), gamers would probably get it, we're talking $200-300 for 20% performance. We all know Athlons are basically a better processor than P4, and they're less expencive, but P4's are slightly better in games. OEMs will probably just stick with their Nvidia TNT2, or maybe even a VANTA. So pathetic...
"And we have seen and do testify that the Father sent the Son to be the Savior of the World"
1 John 4:14
While Trident may have come up with a low-cost 3-D graphics card breakthrough of sorts, that's what SiS claimed with the 305 and 315 chipset cards, which proved to be a bit disappointing in 3-D performance.
I'm not sure if OEM's here in the USA want to install cards using the new Trident XP4 chipset, especially when you consider that for slightly more money OEM's can install cards with the ATI RV250 chipset, which will likely offer much better overall 3-D performance, especially for DirectX 9.0. Indeed, the ATI RV250 chipset cards are definitely aimed for the various small computer assemblers, and because of the cachet of the ATI brand name will likely be quite popular, too.
I think this is a troll, I've seen similar posts before, but never seen an MSDN add.
Of course, having now said that, I'll either see one as soon as I submit this post, or 20 people will reply claiming they've seen one.
Advanced users are users too!
This is all purely anecdotal, but in 2000 I worked at a startup for about six months that was ultra-shoestring (even by the standards of most startups). Our developer workstations used these super7 motherboards with everything integrated on them (sound, modem, etc. pretty much everything but an ethernet card, for those we had $7 realtek cards). The graphics subsystem was by SiS (I want to say 635?), using 8mb of shared memory. *That was the crappiest system and video performance I have ever seen.* Hands down. How bad? Baaaaad. Like, move a window and it'd pick up blitting errors as it moved across the screen bad. Scroll text in a browser and the sound stream off the cd drive skips caliber-of-suck. To this day I'll travel miles out of my way to avoid shared memory video. Ever since then I've mentally expanded SiS to "Shitty, intensely Shitty".
Then, in the past three months or so, I've actually run across some pretty nice bits of hardware than were SiS-branded (one was a SiS 6236 (or was it 6326?) 8m pci card in a server, I was impressed that it's x11 performance didn't compeletely suck; the other is the SiS 735 chipset that gave a computer I built for somebody decent/good athlon performance and an integrated nic for the price of an expensive dinner). I was very suprised. Not that the products in question were earth shattering on an absolute scale, but when you compare them to what they'd been producing a few years back, the difference was just night and day. Sort of like running into the wastoid stoner dude you knew in high school, only now he's a high school physics teacher...
So I guess the moral of this is that past performance is not a reliable indicator of future behavior. (c.f. any mutual fund prospectus to see a graphic illustration of that ;-p)
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
I didn't post it as a deliberate troll but I see what you mean.
I should also point out that the card they were able to benchmark was running at production speed (don't know about the RAM though), so they really should be representative of the retail versions.
actually, I meant to reply to the parent of your post, so I didn't mean to imply that you were the troll.
:)
Sorry for the misunderstanding
Advanced users are users too!