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Trident Back From the Dead

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the now-thats-just-plain-wierd dept.

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. "

6 of 225 comments (clear)

  1. Not a DirectX 9 part by wpmegee · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  2. Nothing wrong with a little competition... by altgrr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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    Like car accidents, most hardware problems are due to driver error.
  3. Good luck, they'll need it... by sterno · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

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  4. Hey Idiots! They're trying to CHANGE!!! by swordgeek · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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
  5. Re:Who's next? by 13Echo · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  6. This is the same Trident by r_j_prahad · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.