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.

Re:Trident 8900

[ThereIsNoSporkNeo]

In breaking news, market fluff has been found to have super-conductive capabilites.

This substance, also known as corporate BS (cBS2) is available almost anywhere where products are sold. Due to its ready availability and near-infinite supply, specialists are looking into its computing usages.

Marketing fluff has long been known to transfer information at a very great rate, often causing the specs of a product to arrive before the product itself is created. This, using the theory of relativity, means that the cBS2 is transfering information at a rate greater than the speed of light, making it the fastest transfer medium that has been found up to this point.

Re:Trident 8900

[topham]

yes i can. Their old 256K cards, upgradable to 512K had such a slow memory/DAC combination that the frequency required to support the card was below that of almost any monitor available on the market at the time.

I choked when I had to replace the card. Replaced it with an ET4000 card. (Only problem with Et4000 was its allergy to PCI-ISA bridge chipsets.).

For an ISA card it was damn fast.
(Tridents response to me when I asked about the frequency problem was 'Go buy a new, 1Meg video card'. I did... it just wasn't a trident.)

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.

Re:Not a DirectX 9 part

[CaseyB]

Big sticker on front of box:

"HEY KIDS!! Now with GL_NV_OCCLUSION_QUERY and GL_NV_VERTEXT_ARRAY_RANGE2 support!"

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.

Re:Nothing wrong with a little competition...

[13Echo]

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.

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.

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.

Re:Marketing stratagey 101

[telstar]

2. Charge less little for it

• Less little? Is that anything like more gooder?

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.

Re:Who's next?

[ottawanker]

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.

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.

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.

Let me see if I can recap my video card history.

[BrookHarty]

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?

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??