Slashdot Mirror
Trident XP4 Reviewed
ceebABC writes "In a new review, the Trident XP4 got a nasty reception. Based on the tests, it sounds like Trident has got some work to do on the thing. Looks like this GPU is dead on arrival." Our last story on Trident mentioned them coming back from the dead. Maybe not.
than my lowly i810. :)
P.S. Am I the only one getting connection issues on Slashdot? Has Slashdot been Slashdotted?
"Times have not become more violent. They have just become more televised."
-Marilyn Manson
They only test one resolution, 1600*1200! Maybe it's just me, but I don't see a lot of laptops with 1600* resolution. The whole review is only meant to make the card look bad, it doesn't take into consideration price, power/heat consumption, or other important factors. It is biased, shallow and not worthy of a /.ing!
Moderation: Put your hand inside the puppet head!
It would be interesting to see a review of the card at normal resolution (the target market for the Trident probably can't even do 1600x1200 on their monitor, 1024x768 is a more reasonable resolution), and comparing it to a typical two year old card.
If it does hardware T&L and doesn't cost much, it would be a nice replacement for the ATI Rage 128 Pro that I have.
Hardly. The product reviewed was far from the polished final version we'll see in stores, and the drivers were beta and buggy. I'm not saying it will live up the "80% of a Ti4600" claim, but the price point will put it in competition with the vastly inferior MX series.
Regardless, Trident's biggest customer has always been OEM's, so if they can deliver a cheap, decent card, they'll easily hit their target market.
The future isn't what it used to be.
The review starts off saying this is a GPU for $100 cards and then compares it to GF4-4200 and ATI9500 Pro. Then proceeds to laugh at it for poor comparisons. Methinks Trident is going to laugh all the way to the bank when they clean up the cheap prebuilt box with embedded video market.
back when I was poor(college) I bought my first PCI card for $45. It was a trident 1Meg upgradeable to 2. It worked good for Doom. Now most of the new kit hitting the market is pure, unadulterated junk and it costs more. I fear this trend is related to the overall decline in the tech economy. I think I will hold out on my purchases until these companies find a way to put some cash back into thier R&D bugets and increase the quality of thier products. Maybe cut CEO salaries?
Karma: Censored (mostly affected by decency laws)
Dated August 2002. And the word Preview, right in the title bar.
Granted 1600x1200 wasnt fair either, but this isnt a notebook chip, its a desktop chip (unlike what other poster said). And its intended to compete with the likes of the GF4 and Radeon cards.
I failed to see any testing of its performance doing DX9 specific tasks. It obviously isn't going to smoke a GeforceFX card, but will it be better than a Geforce3 or Geforce4 at running DX9 and OpenGL 2.0 shaders?
And I would have really liked to have seen them run the tests at 1024x768 anyway despite the lack of AA in the drivers.
I'm a loser baby, so why don't you kill me.
Ok one thing I didn't see (and IRTFA), was the overall "playability" of the games or applications.
Dumb down the tests and give it to joe-six pack (you know, the ones who WON'T spend the extra 300 bucks for 30 trillion pixal shading?) and see what they think.
Does it run the app fine? Does the game run smooth in a comfortable screensize?
Being broke lately, I've come to appreciate that UT2003, or Dungeon Seige runs just fine on my celeron 533 with 512 meg ram, and while a more powerful graphics card would make it run even better, my 2 year old Gforce2 works just fine.
Just fine for the Cheapo price I would pay for the same card nowadays.
Extremetech turned me off of readership in the past by their lack of credible articles, and this just reinforces why I stopped reading it.
Personal opinion should be available at the END of an article, not the beginning opening bias.
Well my Word document just decided to unfreeze and let me save, so I will end this rant.
Yo Grark
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
Canadian Bred with American Buttering
I think you are being unfair here. I've got a Radeon 9000 PRO and I've found both the Windows and Linux drivers to be of very good quality. Don't think I've ever had any instability problems with either set-up (apart from the normal Windows stability, or lack of, of course).
This used to be the case in the past, but they are much better now. Not Nvidia quality, not yet, but they are getting there.
I'd love it if they'd release an open source linux driver though, that'd be cool!
Doesn't anyone else notice that the nvidia geforce chipset 3D demos are a bit misleading. Sure, those things look awesome, and even better, they're in real time!
The problem is, you won't even be able to see anything like that in a game anyways because there are more objects showing on the screen in a game. Heck, I bet a card that's 2 year older can pull something off like those demos with good graphics coding.
I just wish they would show something more practical.
Remember, this part is probably OEM targeted, not enthusiast marketed. Most users will say, "Gee, that thingamabob's got 2.4 gigahertz of RAM, wow it's fast!" and buy it, not realizing they got shafted on the video.
Carry out this philosophy across the machine, and you can shave $100-200 off the price of the machine, at least.
InThane