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Graphics Software

Trident Back From the Dead 234

Posted by CmdrTaco 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. "
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Trident Back From the Dead More

Trident Back From the Dead

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  • Trident 8900 (Score:3, Insightful)

    by ergo98 ( 9391 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:26AM (#4025216) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • well ergo98 is probably right, this is just marketing fluff at this point. However, I doubt that Andandtech would post a review on something that was complete speculation. In any case, it is always good to have more competition... Even if Trident can't compete with Nvidia and ATI for the high-end consumer cards, they can still have a place for those that don't play video games or need a lot of texture memory. As long as their hardware quality holds out and the drivers are somewhat decent, this can't really be a bad thing. Just my opinion though.
    • 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 (Score:4, Funny)

      by topham ( 32406 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:46AM (#4025354) Homepage
      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.)

    • Heh.

      My file server (no X11, no monitor) has an Nvidia Geforce 2MX... hey, it was already in the barebones system I used as a base to start from!
      • My home server/gateway (Firewall, DHCP, etc etc) has no video card at all. Once I installed it, I removed the AGP SiS 6326, and, apart from a couple beeps then it starts up, it works just fine. Lilo and Linux talk to COM1, the only thing I can't do is enter the BIOS, but WGAF.
        Went thru many kernel upgrades and reboots and never missed the monitor, also because it sits in a tiny closet where I can't hear its noise and a screen+keyboard wouldn't even fit in that place.

        On the other hand, I *do* appreciate that it eats a couple Watts less, gives off less heat, and I really hope someone builds an AGP Gigabit Ethernet card someday, since that's the only free slot left :-)
  • 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.

  • Trident (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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 [www.extrae...rl.wrigley] 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.

  • Oh nooo!! (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Stay dead, you evil bastard! Stay dead!!!

    *ahem*

    Yes, sir. I ownded a Trident, too.

  • Not a DirectX 9 part (Score:5, Informative)

    by wpmegee ( 325603 ) <wpmegee AT yahoo DOT com> on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:34AM (#4025263)
    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.
    • I wish DirectX wasn't the way people compared their cards to, I'd much rather see OpenGL specs, since I never play with DirectX (since I run with dual celeron 533's, DX runs like total crap)
      • Amen to that. Why is a proprietary system the de facto standard for rating a video cards worth. Some work should be done to create a truly open video standard and pull the rug out from under MicroSoft.
        • just an FYI, they dropped the uppercase S a while ago from their name.

          I really do wish that there were open standards across the boards, but I don't see it ever happening when Microsoft has such a big share of windows gamers.

    • Re:Not a DirectX 9 part (Score:3, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 )
      But the Radeon 9700 is available for benchmarking. Benchmarks are on the anandtech site.

    • Re:Not a DirectX 9 part (Score:2, Interesting)

      by mczak ( 575986 )
      For that matter, no current processor has the fill rate necessary to comply with the Pixel Shader 2.0 specs
      Are you sure of that? AFAIK there are no requirements at all about fill rate which must be satisfied to comply with ps 2.0 specs. You are probably refering to the 16 textures per pass which a chip must be able to do to be dx9 compliant, but this has nothing to do with fill rate. You can easily build a 100Mhz, single pipe, single TMU (must be able to do 16 loopbacks) GPU which is DX9 compliant with a paltry fillrate of 100MPixels/s (and also 100MTexels/s).
      mczak

  • Nothing wrong with a little competition... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by altgrr ( 593057 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:34AM (#4025267)
    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.
    • I take it you have never had to deal with trident.

      Trident has been known for sucky performance and bad quality hardware.

      I really don't miss them.. I hope they spend a fortune on this and go bankrupt or something.

      • 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.
      • You're right. And their cards used to cost $30. If the card fails, for $30, you'd get another one. It would still be Cheap.

        If you didn't want to deal with that, you could spend $100 on your graphics card. You are apparently not in Trident's target market. If you had a head on your shoulders, you would never have dealt with them at all. Otherwise, you would have been happy to save the $70.

  • Their Name (Score:3, Insightful)

    by scott1853 ( 194884 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:35AM (#4025277)
    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.
    • I don't think they'll be able to live down the stigma associated with their company name.

      I don't know. I like there gum. I havn't tried any of their other products, but it couldn't have been that bad

    • Re:Their Name (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Fuyu ( 107589 )
      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.
      • That stat is coming from the company and not independant benchmarking. I'm a little skeptical. I think it would be more reasonable to assume that it might reach 80% of a GeForce4 MX, unless they're counting on the driver doing all the real work and it's running on a dual 2.5GHz CPU.
    • Funny, but I don't remember Trident having a bad reputation. Where does this come from?

      All cards manufactured during that time frame were slow. You can't pull a card from 10 years ago and expect it to compete with today's accelerated 3D cards. They just didn't exist back then. Sure, Trident's cards made back then are slow today. But they are reliable and do the basic job of delivering a signal to the monitor well.

      Given the technology they have to work with today, their past vision would be welcome.
    • I don't think they'll be able to live down the stigma associated with their company name

      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.

    • Trident wasn't sexy, but they made decent low-end video cards. No hype, no fuss, you got what you expected... a basic, no frills video card.

  • Good luck, they'll need it... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by sterno ( 16320 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:36AM (#4025280) Homepage
    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.

    • Also, the NVIDIA name carries a certain assurance that it's all going to work well.

      Yeah. It'll work great. Until you want to play games in something kinder on the eyes at 60Hz refresh rate on 2K or XP. Then you'll find that they're a pile of shite!

    • The OEM market is where it will hit, if anywhere. Usually, gamers build PC's. They might not put the parts in themselves, but they spec it out (to some extent).
      OEM on the other hand, is a completely different animal. Most OEM builders want good parts, but not great parts. I could easily spend $4000 on a pc, but a $1200 pc sounds much nicer to the masses, as long as the processor has a high number, the graphics card has the going ram on it, and it's Internet Ready, guess which one you're going to sell.
      Take a look at any mass-marketed PC ad in the paper, and you'll see only 32 or 64 mb graphics card listed, and not the make and model.
      The last PC's I bought had Asus V7100 cards in them. In an office where most desktops sit at 8X6, it's overkill. But that was the bottom rung. If they had 4meg PCI's for sale, I would have bought those.

      Solitare doesn't need hardware acceleration!
    • 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*
    • That's right ... and besides, there's already a card with 80% of the performance of a GeForce 4 TI 4600 for $100, its called the GeForce 4 440MX. :-P

  • 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!

    • Re:Marketing stratagey 101 (Score:4, Funny)

      by telstar ( 236404 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:48AM (#4025366)
      2. Charge less little for it
      • Less little? Is that anything like more gooder?
    • "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 cheapest pricewatch price [pricewatch.com] for a GF4 Ti4600 is $280.

      The entry price of the Trident card is $99 (or so the article says.)

      So would you by a card that has 20% less performance than a GF4 Ti4600 and 65% (or better) less cost? Maybe not. But would you put one in your kids' machine or kid brother's machine who has been whining about wanting a 3D upgrade so they can play Max Payne?

      Cha-ching! Cash for Trident from your wallet.

    • 1. Make card 80% as powerful as competition.
      2. Make card cost 1/3 of the competition's.
      3.Sell cards like crazy because few people want to spend >$200 on the video card alone.
      4. Profit!

      Most people are satisfied with the performance of a mid-range video card, and 80% of a high-end card for 30% of the price would be great for many of the "demanding" average users.

      Some people are happy with their graphics, even if they can't get 150 fps out of Quake III.

  • Class 90/10 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:39AM (#4025311)
    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!!! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by swordgeek ( 112599 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:40AM (#4025314) Journal
    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.
    • Given no other data, past performance, no matter what the situation, is ALWAYS the best indicator for the future.

      I'm sure a lot of death row killers are also trying to CHANGE.
    • I still have many old Trident cards. They all were reliable and did their job without fail. And I'm keeping mine, because they still have good utility.
    • >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!!!!

      Who else says this all the time...

      Oh wait a minute, a thought is entering my mind...

      "Windows XP -- The best windows ever!"

      The only way Trident can shake their past is to either change their name (sneaky) or release this product, ensure it lives up to their marketed performance, and release another. By the second or third release cycle I might buy it, because by then they'll have rebuilt their lost trust.

      Maybe. But I really doubt it. I expect to see their stuff in many more crappy PCChips and ECS boards to come, and I don't expect things to change all that much.
    • "Now the new card is going to be cheap, which makes me suspicious of its performance/quality."

      People say the same thing about AMD chips, but they're not exactly going out of business.

      But overall I agree with you ... we must look at a real non-vapourware card and benchmark it before slandering Trident.

    • Hmm. ATI's drivers sucked with the Radeon series, and guess what? They sucked with the Radeon 8500 as well! And they sucked back in the Rage 128 days also! S3 sucked back in the ViRGE days, and sucked more recently in the Savage days. Past history is a very good indicator of future performance. Its up to Trident to overcome their past history. Until then, they deserve the negative response they get.
      • "Past history is a very good indicator of future performance."

        True, with some caveats.

        "Its up to Trident to overcome their past history."

        Also true. (although their history is for making really really cheap cards which they in fact did fairly well)

        "Until then, they deserve the negative response they get."

        Not really. They deserve some suspicion certainly, but they don't deserve to be written off wholesale, sight-unseen. They deserve the chance to overcome their past, whether or not they can.

        For the record, ATI drivers for Solaris are flawless.

    • Yeah, but who really makes the *cards*?? (Score:4, Interesting)

      by Reziac ( 43301 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @01:53PM (#4026839) Homepage Journal
      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??

      • 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.

        Yes! The ISA Trident cards are still my video card of choice for consoles. Their character set has a nice curl on the lower-case 'l', making it really easy to distinguish from '1'. I've yet to find another card, any vendor, any bus, that has a font that nice.

        • Exactly!! The old Trident screen font's wonderful legibility was a MAJOR reason why I stuck with Trident-based cards as long as I did, and why I still use them in old systems.

          I have an ISA 8900 in an XT, believe it or not. The older Trident-based cards have another advantage I'd forgotten in my previous post: All the control lines are in the part of the card that plugs into the 8bit bus. The rest of the bus is only used to increase thruput. So you can hang a Trident ISA card in an 8bit slot, or a VLB card in an ISA slot, and they will still work. A few other ISA cards would also agree to do this, but most won't.

          Back to screen fonts.. My peeve with most cards, Diamond in particular, is the EGA-style screen font: specficially the narrow lowercase m, which is hard to tell from a lowercase n. ATI cards have a tolerable screen font (m/n not quite right but at least legible), tho it sorta looks like it really wanted to be italics, which gets annoying after a while.

          Some S3Trio and S3Virge cards have the same nice screen font as the old Tridents. And I was thrilled when I got a Matrox Millennium G200 and found it too had the same screen font! Guess what's now my card of choice for midrange Pentiums :)

          There are old DOS utils to extract a screen font from the video BIOS and apply it to another system TSR-style, tho I've never used this trick.

  • Is it too late? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by brejc8 ( 223089 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @10:41AM (#4025318) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • no, like all mature markets, you need something the others don't have. In the case of graphics cards, getting .13 or smaller is a huge benefit.

      when a market is mostly driven by one company, its vision can get narrow, nVidia say this, and is releasing video cards of different qualitys. this is a good idea, but there marketing has blown it with there naming, Now its confusing to know which one is the best without research.
  • 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?

    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...

  • I wish this ghost of the past would've stayed where it belongs.. Like, in the past, and inside one of my firewall machines.

    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..

    ..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.

    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?

    • 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..

      Of course, it's all relative. The trident 8900, like all of it Cirrus Logic competitors, were nothing more than a frame buffer that it was up to your CPU to fill : There was virtually no difference between the speed of these unaccelerated cards, and the limit was often the ISA bus (hence why Carmageddon ran that much better on a VL-Bus system).

  • 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.

  • trident cheap...but good in a "niche" (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    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.

    --

  • A differing opinion. (Score:4, Informative)

    by paganizer ( 566360 ) <thegrove1&hotmail,com> on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:00AM (#4025453) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • 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.

  • Welcome Back Trident (Score:4, Insightful)

    by tRoll with Butter ( 542444 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:02AM (#4025479)
    While it's true Trident's earlier ISA products left a lot to be desired performence-wise, their 9680 line and up had excelent 2D performence for the price.

    I remember back in the day picking up PCI Trident 9680 cards from the local wholesaler for $30, and they rivaled the performence of more expensive S3 Trio64V+ based cards. Yes, Trident has been asleep at the wheel during the 3D accelerator revolution, but if wasn't for them, I wouldn't have been playing Duke Nukem 3D at 40+ FPS on a $30 graphics card, or watching MPEG1 VideoCDs full screen at full framerate (the 9680 and up have directdraw overlay support). Unlike ATI at the time (and there was no Nvidia), Trident's drivers were rock-solid and I never experienced visual glitches or driver-related lockups.

    There's a lot to thank Trident for (most recently, the CyberBlade intergrated chipset on the I-Opener) and as long as they produce a cost effective product with good stable drivers, there's a place for them in the video chipset market.

  • Trident not all that bad... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Frobnicator ( 565869 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:04AM (#4025495) Journal
    I own some, along with cards from ATI and nvidia. I am also a 3D graphics programmer, producing 3D interactive applications, so I do know about 3D graphics. (OT: My current project is almost done, anyone need a graphics engine programmer?)

    While they did have quite a few problems with accepting parts from anywhere, the cards I have purchased were VERY inexpensive and did what they said they could. Personally, that's all I ask.

    Yes, they had 3D cards with 4MB of ram that ran at 1024x768. That card works great when doing regular Windows stuff at 1024x768, and when doing 3D at 640x480. It meets the specs, and has a reasonable 3D triangle rate. That particular card is also AGP, which allows great performance for the test machine it is on (P2-300 with 192 MB RAM).

    People often complain about them, but I think that's because they expect whatever they buy to be the best, even when they don't fork out the money for the best.

    If you read the story, they even point this out:

    They're
    a large volume, low cost, low performance manufacturer. Trident was the company making the chips for the no-name "PCI Video Card" boxes you'd find for $29, they were also an OEMs best friend as they could deliver basic graphics functionality at a very low cost.

    Their homepage [tridentmicro.com] even says: " Trident is a global leader in providing affordable, low-power, state-of-the-art 3D graphics integrated circuit solutions for mainstream notebook and personal desktop computers. ". It doesn't say it's an incredible gaming solution, or even claim to be the best; they are there to give non-gamers and non-geeks enough 3D to meet their basic needs at well-under a quarter of the cost of even a GeForce 2. They can give OEM's an integrated 3D card for practically nothing, so the consumers can either use the near-free, low end abilities, or spend the money on a high-end card.

    IMO, the people who don't like Trident are the ones who bought them thinking they were getting a high-power GPU at a firesale price.

    Frob.

    • Actually, some of Trident's first 3D chipsets were downright awful. I got one of the first Trident "AGP" cards (the chipset number escapes me). I put "AGP" in quotes because Trident pulled a 3Dfx-style PCI-chip-on-an-AGP-card; it ran at 1X AGP and didn't offer *any* of AGP's extra features.

      Then I tried running games on it. The image quality, at best, was worse than the Direct3D software renderer -- the textures were blurred beyond recognition and the framerate was lower than in software mode. And the drivers had a peculiar bug where enabling MIP mapping shaded all but the closest textures purple.

      Needless to say, I haven't bought a Trident product since. It's very likely their products have greatly improved since then, but this is the kind of thing that keeps people from wanting to buy Trident products.

      • Actually, some of Trident's first 3D chipsets were downright awful.
        I think that is true of most of the inital rollout of commodity 3D video cards. There were bad cards from almost everyone in the market. I have heard bad things about cards from 3Dfx, Asus, ATI, Diamond, Hercules, S3, Matrox, Trident and others. Even a few NVidia cards had problems. Of course, your description sounds really terrible -- I haven't seen any video card do that bad, from Trident or other companies.
        this is the kind of thing that keeps people from wanting to buy Trident products.
        If you are interested in buying a 3D video card, Trident isn't for you. That's why they market to people who AREN'T looking for the capability, but want at least some hardware support.
        • There were bad cards from almost everyone in the market. I have heard bad things about cards from 3Dfx, Asus, ATI, Diamond, Hercules, S3, Matrox, Trident and others.
          Yep, and I've used built computers with most of them at one time or another. That Trident one was in an entirely different league, though.
          If you are interested in buying a 3D video card, Trident isn't for you. That's why they market to people who AREN'T looking for the capability, but want at least some hardware support.
          Well, I don't buy them only for myself. I routinely get handed scrapped computers with just a few parts bad or missing, fill in the missing parts, and give the computers to charity. Needless to say, I don't get high-end parts, but I don't fill them with junk, either. That experience with Trident completely shied me away from their cards, even as low-end parts to give away -- it's not that it didn't have powerful enough hardware support, it's that it didn't work right at all, and they would have been better off sticking with straight 2D rather than trying to sell a 3D card and not doing it right.

          Like I said, Trident has probably massively improved their 3D accelerators (since you can't stay in business selling faulty hardware) but this is what makes people not want to get Trident cards, not the "my GeForce is bigger than yours" syndrome.

  • Why is everyone so hard on Trident? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Phoenix ( 2762 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:08AM (#4025518)
    As I've said in the past, competition is good for innovation in product. More people in the industry means that everyone has to get off thier arse and create new and quality product or fall by the wayside.

    Besides, what was wrong with Trident? Sure the drivers could at times be hard to find...this is not that much different from ATI and some of the Radeon 7500 drivers. Trident cards are damn hard to kill and I still have a brace of them in use in my Linux servers. These are cards that date back to '95 and the 486 and they are still going.

    And honestly, 80% of the capability of a TI-4600 would be perfect for the computers that I make for my friends and thier children playing the Hardware accellerated Edu-Tainment software that is coming out. For them I need something pretty good at a reasonable cost. Which is the market that Trident has always sat in. Pretty good and pretty inexpensive.

    Which brings up another point. With so many people out there willing to go with almost as good but cheaper cards, ATI and nVidia will have to rethink thier pricing schemes...Personally I'd love to see the TI-4600 drop a little more before I chuck my GF3TI-500 for it.

    • 80% of a TI-4600 is really dang good! I'll never pay $250+ for a graphics card, which is why I still have my old GeForce DDR for player games with (it does reasonably well at 1024x768, even on brand new games, as long as the scenery isn't complicated). If Trident followed through on their claim of a 80% TI-4600 for less than $100, I would buy it if everything else like drivers are rock-solid. Seems like a no-brainer to me.

      I just hope it's not just hype and will come out reasonably soon.

  • 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?

  • 80% Performace for $100? (Score:3, Insightful)

    by sevensharpnine ( 231974 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:15AM (#4025549)
    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 (Score:5, Interesting)

    by r_j_prahad ( 309298 ) <r_j_prahadNO@SPAMhotmail.com> on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @11:36AM (#4025652)
    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.

    • Spot on. All the NVidia performance in the world doesn't do me a darn bit of good without a Free Software driver. Sure, I can buy an NVidia card and hope they keep supporting their closed source driver, but I would much rather purchase hardware that came with a Free Software driver (even if the hardware isn't quite as spiffy). The fact that the card will be cheaper is also a huge bonus.

      • I'll add my 'me too'. Look forward to the closed binary NVidia drivers breaking several times this year, due to internal kernel changes in locking etc which will be transparent for any driver provided in source. Hopefully NVidia will get a clue at some point. In the meantime I will support Trident if they get anywhere near the 80% performance they aim at, so long as they publish their register-level specs.

        It would be nice if the Trident part doesn't need its own fan.
    • So what's the situation with Trident and their video drivers for Linux?

      A quick Google search came up with complaints that they aren't providing the Xfree86 developers specs of their hardware and apparently number of their common chipsets remain unaccelerated under Linux. Since Trident has pretty much fallen off radar however I don't know if that is still true. Graphics chips being their bread and butter, and common in cheap generic hardware, I'm not sure I'd raise them on an open source pedestal for providing drivers for some of their sound chips only.

      They are parading the banners of some of the largest PC OEMs on their website, a number of which (try to) appear friendly towards the Linux community, so it'd be truly positive if their upcoming commodity chips would be properly supported by open source drivers. Closed binary drivers may be fine for a while, until the company cuts the oxygen supply.

      On the dark shadowy corner we have Micro$oft, the eternal holders of the DirectX belt, who would much rather not see a flood of $300 PCs coming out with complete and perfect driver support under Linux...

      I'd kind of be up for a new video card and the specs per price ratio of these new Tridents seem okay to me, but I'm hoping to give my cash to really nice guys who really support my favourite platform.
  • 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...
    • ATI, Matrox, Trident - I'm waiting...

      I was waiting too until I got sick of it and got a GF4 4200 128MB. Yes, the drivers are closed source but they are fully featured and work *fine*. Sure beats my friend's Radeon 8500 open source driver which still doesn't support half of the things the card is capable of. How long does he have to wait to get the full support for the hardware he bought 6 months ago? ATI is cheap and lame - they think they only have to open the specs for the card while the Weather Channel pays for the driver development. I mean the Radeaon 9700 will cost $400. For that kind of money I bloody well expect a shiny new Linux driver.

  • Pull a Matrox? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by nekdut ( 74793 )
    It seems that Trident is trying to pull a Matrox and resurrect themselves from the 3D video card grave yard

    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.

  • 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.
  • 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

  • Let me see if I can recap my video card history. (Score:3, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Wednesday August 07, 2002 @12:40PM (#4026137) Journal
    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? [adam-lilienthal.de]

  • 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.

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