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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.
That review
has really
great formating.
I just love
to read in
one thin
column. Or
maybe they just
have funky
formating for
IE?
The surprise isn't how often we make bad choices; the surprise is how seldom they defeat us.
This card rivals the ATI Raedon for the 'worst drivers in the industry' award?
It makes me wonder why an AnandTech article gave such a different opinion. Which one is right?
From page two...
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.
... from the lack of posts. Don't you know we're oly interested in Microsoft's failed projects?
P.S.: Anyone else experiencing extreme sluggishness about /. today? Earlier, I've had articles loading in background tabs for more than a minute. o_o
P.S. Update (10 mins later)!: Ouch. Maybe it wasn't such a good idea, noting the above comment, to intoduce another step and try previewing before submitting. -_-
I admit that I don't know much about graphics cards or GPUs, and it's obvious that the Trident got smoked. But was it a fair comparison? According to the review, the Trident goes for under $100, yet they benchmark it against what appears to be higher end (more expensive) graphics cards.
Wouldn't it be a more fair comparison if they benchmarked against cards of the same price range? If you were shopping for a cheap card, you obviously wouldn't expect it to perform as well as a more expensive card anyway, would you? What do others think?
---
Open Source Shirts
Historically, for the last 6-7 years, Trident has always focused on the mobile graphics market, and in that space, they are much more dominant. The XP4 is basically an evolution of Trident's mobile GPUs, and is really intended for use in mobile systems, hence the considerations such as reduced transistor count, etc. There's little difference between the mobile XP4 and the desktop XP4, and yet Trident is marketing it as a desktop one.
For a laptop, the 3D benchmark scores are actually quite decent.
But for them to call it a desktop GPU is just asking for trouble, as the article clearly describes.
There's 10 types of people in this world, those who understand binary and those who don't.
Then he proceeds to run this card at 1600x1200 with beta drivers against cards with excellent debugged drivers. Any sort of numerical or empirical evidence he could get at this point is about .05% useful to me.
Sure the thing may only get 4.9 FPS on a new demanding game at 1600x1200 with beta drivers. I bet you that same card will belt out over 60fps at 1024x768 when the real drivers are released.
People seem to forget that a video card driver's quality can be the difference between horrible performance and class leading performance. If the driver is not debugged and performance optimzed, there is nothing a hardware designer could do to make that card perform well.
I say that this is an excellent card that will allow users who do not want to spend $500 on a video card to play the latest and greatest games on the market. It is a Dx9 card, with full support. To me, this is an excellent card.
I bet they sell a whole boatload of these things to OEM manufacturers and those who do not really want to spend an entire car payment on moving some pixels around. -TinyManCan
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
They show the results of very different tests. 800x600 vs 1600x1200 resolution. That's a difference of 4x in required fill rate. Since neither of these tests were run at a relevant resolution (most laptops run around 1024x768), neither can be called conclusive. My guess it that Anand is waiting for more stable drivers to test "real" resolutions.
The extremetech.com review is pretty unfair, it's like testing a new Ferrari by seeing how much cargo it can carry and then declaring it a bad car because it doesn't haul as much as a Ford Explorer. This card is aimed at lower resolution (lower fill rate) applications that require low power and cost. Having a DX9 entrant into this arena to me is welcome.
We'll just have to wait for a real review to see if this card is any good.
-Ryan C.
-Ryan C.
It seems that Trident want's back into the GPU mainstream. They developed this card, the XP4, and are releasing it to benchmarkers early for reviewing purposes as many card makers do.
In one review, we have extremetech maxing up the resolutions and detail levels of some heavy hitting games, in addition to a 3dmark benchmark, against two of the biggest cards out there. These cards are at least twice the MSRP of this card. Extremetech then complains that the inexpensive card with beta drivers doesn't tread water against the established champs.
In a different review, anandtech set the resolution to something normal (how many gamers out there actually run the game at 1600x1200?) and they show the card as giving fluid performance, even beating the Radeon 9000 in one map. Albeit still behind the other two cards reviewed on some tests, they do mention that the drivers are beta and that finalized they will probably make the card perform much better.
I've been noticing that extremetech's reviews seem really, well, extreme. At least from my perception they will give good reviews to what can keep pace with the top cards or exceed the top card - and at times seems to focus on the war between NVidia and ATI for the title of Supreme cardmaker.
But how long ago was it that both of these companies were in Trident's situation? How long ago was it that these companies were struggling against 3dfx?
Like many before me ahve said, wait and see. This card could turn out to be the best card price for performance wise. It could come out and have the mobile version do everything else in. It could come out and be complete crap against whatever new cards the twin titans come out with.
----- I want my LART.
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
Despite what their marketing might say, Trident is obviously not REALLY trying to compete with the latest and greatest from nVidia and ATI. This is obviously piece of budget hardware for people who don't want to pay a whole lot to get DX 9 compatible card.
Sure, if I build a gaming rig, this isn't the card I'm going to use. I'm going to spend the cash for a high end card, and probably brag about my insane frame rates the next time I take it to a LAN party.
On the other hand, if I built a PC for someone who isn't planning on playing Doom 3 extensively, I might actually consider a card of this calibur. It is a DX 9 card for under $100. This is probably a decent choice for a bargain PC.
"You spoony bard!" -Tellah
but then again, drivers can be tweaked to skew benchmarks. Trust review sites...
but then again, all the review sites are bought and paid for by various vendors with special interests. Trust your parents.
Oh god... my dad is John Ashcroft... NEVERMIND...
I'm Rick James with mod points biatch!
While most of the /.ers have noted that the review of the XP4 on extremetech was unfair, they may not realize just how unreasonable extremetech was in putting this sub-$100 card against the best cards on the market.
Because the XP4 deviates from the long-established, direct-mode rendering (which is a brute force method) for tile-based rendering, they are going to need a lot of time to get their drivers in order before they will be able to compete properly with the familiar video cards. The only other card mainstream card that attempted this rendering approach was the Kyro series, which demonstrated that tile-based rendering does have huge potential and that drivers will make or break the card's performance.
Interesting enough, because video cards using the tile-based rendering method are more efficient by 200-300%* when compared to cards using the traditional method, they should see a much lower performance decrease as the screen resolution is increased when compared against direct-mode renderers (e.g. NVidia NV9 cards and ATI Radeon 9500s). While it's true that fill rates do increase substantially with increased resolution, direct-mode renderers simply will experience that much more overfill.
*Direct-mode renderers have an overfill rate of about 2 or 3; this means that for every pixel visible two or three more have been rendered and then disgarded. Tile-based renderers, on the other hand, disgard everything that won't be visible first and only render what's left, giving them an overfill of 0. Figuring out what to cull first before rendering has begun is more complicated than culling excess pixels after they are rendered; this complexity is what makes writing the drivers for a tile-based renderer such a difficult task.
Trident has set for themselves an incredibly difficult challenge: 1) Make a card that uses a tile-based rendering method, which means throwing out nearly everything the graphics card industry has learned the past couple decades. 2) In addition to the first task, they have added the complexity of sharing graphical resources, thus adding all the timing problems associated with such a configuration. If they achieve only 50% of the performance of Nvidia's Geforce4 TI4600, that alone would be a considerable achievement. If Trident meets the 80% performance target they set for themselves, it will be all the more impressive.
Since when does the mainstream computer user play games in 1600x1200? Even mid-range 17" monitors are going to get fuzzy in 1600x1200, 1280x1024 or 1024x768 is much more likely.