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Trident XP4 Reviewed 157

Posted by michael from the only-mostly-dead dept.
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.
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Trident XP4 Reviewed More

Trident XP4 Reviewed

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  • ...And this is why you shouldn't believe the prerelease specs. Nothing ever performs to spec; trust the benchmarks.

    It's pretty common, really. But I haven't usually seen it to this degree.

    • was it fair? (Score:3, Insightful)

      by ryochiji ( 453715 )
      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?
      • The 9000 128 MB cards go for $100 street price these days, and the Ti4200s are only $20 more. The 9500 Pro is a prerelease part, MSRP of $199 less a $20 Mail-in rebate (street should hit $150 within 2 weeks I'd gather).

        The Trident card just sucked.... Trident talked some nice trash before release, just like Matrox with the Parhelia.
        • Firstly, the Trident people were idiots to give their cpu to a site like "ExtremeTech" whose focus is on x-treme desktop gamers. They should have stuck to "cheap laptop enthusiast" sites ;)

          None the less:

          You're comparing a MSRP of below $100 vs a "super special online lowest price ever street deal" of $100 for a $150 desktop GPU.

          I can't find a *Retail* (vs OEM) price for the 9000 128 MB part below $150 USD here in Toronto.

          AFAIAK the reviewer clearly pulled a dumbass move by running a grossly unfair comparison (the worst possible - 1600x1200x32bit-fsaa against a 9500 and a 4200 - how stupid is he), and of course is now being highly defensive.

          Isn't the XP4 a *mobile* cpu? Does it use active cooling? Or passive? What about the Raedon 9000? So does that make them a good pair to compare?

          I'd like to see what the retail storefront price and the bulk-OEM prices are of a MOBILE version of the 9000 vs the XP4 and the performance comparison at 1024x768x16bit once they've released their FCS tile drivers for the XP4.
      • Even "to scale" to compensate for its dirt cheap price, it still doesn't stack up.
      • The sub $100 Trident was being compared to $400+ cards!
        They should have compared it to comparable priced cards which now would be a Radeon 7000-8000 series!

        That test was a crock!

        If you look at the Radeon 9000 Pro, it's at $149.00 at CompUSA ATM but that's not even a fair comparison! It started out new at $400 and has dropped in price. The Trident is starting at $100 and will probably drop into the 30s.

        No card is worth it's introduction pricing and once it hits the below $50, I'd say it was a great deal!
        • The 9000 Pro never cost $400.

          The 9000 and 9700 were released around the same time.

          At release, the 9000 was priced to compete with the 8500.

          Perhaps you are confused about the difference between the $80 9000 Pro and the $350 9700 Pro?
        • Well, considering how Trident was talking up how these cards would get blown away by their new graphics card, I think the comparison is wholy fair.
    • ...And this is why you shouldn't believe the prerelease specs. Nothing ever performs to spec; trust the benchmarks.

      It's pretty common, really. But I haven't usually seen it to this degree.

      This has nothing to do with lying about specs. The problem with these damn things was the GPU was dead, not under performing, it was dead on arrival. Now, I wonder why this happened? Two possible reasons, quality control failure, or unlikely random failure due to damage after manufacture? I think I'll prefer to believe that it was indeed a quality control failure. These cards should be tested before leaving the factory floor, otherwise bad things like this will happen to you and screw you big time. Quality assurance is a quick and easy thing to do, without increasing costs too much, and I know that I would rather pay a little more to be assured that I'm getting something that works, without me having to send it back to get a replacement for it.

      The lesson? Check your work carefully if you don't want to look like an ass... See .sig...

    • Re:Lying With Statistics (Score:4, Funny)

      by Proc6 ( 518858 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @11:10PM (#4830618)
      ...And this is why you shouldn't believe the prerelease specs. Nothing ever performs to spec; trust the benchmarks.

      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...

    • 4 out of 5 dentists recommend Trident to their patients who chew gum. Meanwhile they only asked 5 dentists. 4 of whom just happened to be on payroll.

      Oh wait, wrong Trident.

  • Formating for speed readers? (Score:5, Funny)

    by GoofyBoy ( 44399 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @05:57PM (#4828704) Journal
    That review
    has really
    great formating.

    I just love
    to read in
    one thin
    column. Or
    maybe they just
    have funky
    formating for
    IE?
  • than my lowly i810. :) P.S. Am I the only one getting connection issues on Slashdot? Has Slashdot been Slashdotted?

    • Re:I'm sure it's better... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Connection issues here too. Only the front and default story pages load. I'm surprised this comment page loaded (took a good minute from my cable modem though. No, every other site loads normally, so it's not some pira^H^H^H^Hcopyright infringing ass next door leaching away all my bandwidth)

      Maybe that annoyed spammer's getting his revenge on /.

  • Is it possible? (Score:3, Funny)

    by Wheaty18 ( 465429 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @05:59PM (#4828717)
    This card rivals the ATI Raedon for the 'worst drivers in the industry' award?

    • Re:Is it possible? (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Wiz ( 6870 )
      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!

  • Meanwhile, back in Denmark... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Cap'n Canuck ( 622106 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:00PM (#4828725)
    Ouch! That review was particularly brutal!

    It makes me wonder why an AnandTech article [anandtech.com] gave such a different opinion. Which one is right?

    From page two...
    Basically we're at a "wait and see" point with Trident but there is the potential for the XP4 to deliver on all of their claims
    • Its simple. AnandTech ran their benchmarks at 800x600 instead of 1600x1200. Why in the world you would test a notebook graphics card at 1600x1200 for a 3d game is beyond me.

    • Re:Meanwhile, back in Denmark... (Score:4, Interesting)

      by InfernoBlade ( 472055 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:36PM (#4828968)
      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.
      • First line in the article says the chip was intended for notebook computers:

        Some months back, Trident made much ado about its new DX9-class GPU that would take the mobile computing world by storm.

        If this isnt the case than thats just another strike against the article.

        • Yup another strike against the article. There's another one, the XP4 T1 (or similar) that is coming out LATER for mobile computing. This is the desktop chip, which I believe is called the T2.

          Take a look at the testing environment page.

    • They're both right (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Ryan C. ( 159039 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @07:00PM (#4829205)
      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.

    • Re:Meanwhile, back in Denmark... (Score:1, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Also to note is that AnandTech tested under Win 98SE, while ExtreamTech tested under Win XP.

      Add to this some comments from AnandTechs preview:
      Trident had a Pentium 4 2.53GHz system running on Intel's 845G motherboard with their reference T2 board. The system had both Windows 98SE and Windows XP installed, the reason being that the XP drivers were not as stable as the 98SE drivers at this point.
      We could not get the card to run UT2003 under Windows XP at all so we were forced to use Windows 98SE for all of our tests.


      Take it with a grain of salt.
  • Why I have not ever heard of this GPU before, I do not know. Anyone else not heard of it?

  • Horrible Review (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Marx_Mrvelous ( 532372 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:01PM (#4828733) Homepage
    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!

    • Re:Horrible Review (Score:4, Interesting)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:31PM (#4828925)
      A lot of laptops have 1600x1200 resolution. But what do laptops have to do with anything? These are desktop chips. And they do take into account price: they mention that even if these are significantly cheaper than the Radeon 9000 Pro, they suck so bad it still wouldn't be worth it. A Radeon 9000 Pro runs $80 these days. This thing would have to sell around $30 for it to be any good, and projected retail prices are a whole lot higher than that ($100). As for power consumption, who cares? AGP only provides 25 watts of power, and none of the tested cards used an extra power connector. Even if the Radeon 9000 used the full power, and this card use 1/5 the power, the difference of 20 watts is worth jack shit.

      • You're assuming the market. (Score:4, Interesting)

        by InThane ( 2300 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @07:45PM (#4829531) Homepage Journal
        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.

    • Re:Horrible Review (Score:3, Interesting)

      by pboulang ( 16954 )
      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!
      A) Why do you think this is for laptops only? Not that it matters, cause you don't often change the video card on your laptop..
      B) I agree the whole review stays away from the whole "calm objectivity" range of emotions. Face it, the reviewer was pretty upset about the poor showing, having expected better
      With its spec sheet and clock rates, we were looking forward to testing the XP4 - we hoped it would make things interesting in the GPU arena. But from out[sic] test results, the XP4 is dead on arrival.

      C) The article does take price into consideration:
      Even if XP4-based boards can substantially undercut the Radeon 9000 Pro on price, the woefully inadequate performance won't justify any amount of savings. Its 3D performance across the board is simply unacceptable versus present-day competition.
    • No? Our 1-year old Dell Inspiron 8100 with a 14.1" LCD uses 1400x1050. The 15" screen would go to 16x12. I expect that most, if not all, of currently-shipping laptops to do 1600x1200 easily.
      • You would be suprised...

        Dell seems to be the best for Hi res screens...others may do them, but only on the extreme high end desktop replacement models, and even then they screw you in the video department...

        • I own a Toshiba Satellite Pro 6100... afaik, Tosh actually make at least one of the 1600x1200 panels that Dell uses. It's got very decent video for a laptop (GF4 Go, separate DDR VRAM - same as the Dell Inspiron I compared it with), so there appears to be at least one exception to your statement. It's also more than a desktop replacement - real mobile P4, WiFi, Bluetooth, lasts more than two hours on battery... It's being repaired right now, but I'm not blaming them (hard drive failure).

          A friend owns a Dell Optiplex with a P4 2.53GHz and integrated i830 graphics - it runs UT2K3 so badly it's unplayable at everything higher than 640x480x16xreally-low-detail, so it'll be even worse on a laptop. Thankfully, I don't have that problem - admittedly I own the top-of-the-line model, but still...

    • Re:Horrible Review (Score:2, Informative)

      by homer_ca ( 144738 )
      Maybe Extreme Tech is catering to the high end gamer, but they state that they only test at 2 resolutions 1024x768x32 w/ 4xAA and 1600x1200x32. But hey the site's run by ZDnet so whaddaya expect? Comprehensive tests?

      Even assuming that the Trident's performance falls off disproportionately at high resolutions (so instead of 1/4 the speed of a GF4 Ti4200, it's maybe 1/3 the speed), it's still pretty pitiful. Nvidia's budget chip, the MX440, totally spanks it. It might be closer if you test the DX9 features that the Trident supposedly supports in hardware, but that's wait and see.
      • >>But hey the site's run by ZDnet so whaddaya expect? Comprehensive tests? Slightly off-topic point of clarification: ExtremeTech is run (and owned) by Ziff Davis Media, not ZDNet. Back in the day, Ziff and ZDNet were part of one company, but they were split apart a few years ago, and ZDNet was ultimately acquired by CNET. (I worked at Ziff, then spun out with ZDNet, rolled into CNET and came back to Ziff, so I've seen the whole process unfold from a number of angles.) Matthew Rothenberg Online editor Ziff Davis Media
        • >>But hey the site's run by ZDnet so whaddaya expect? Comprehensive tests?

          Slightly off-topic point of clarification: ExtremeTech is run (and owned) by Ziff Davis Media, not ZDNet.

          Back in the day, Ziff and ZDNet were part of one company, but they were split apart a few years ago, and ZDNet was ultimately acquired by CNET. (I worked at Ziff, then spun out with ZDNet, rolled into CNET and came back to Ziff, so I've seen the whole process unfold from a number of angles.)

          Matthew Rothenberg
          Online editor
          Ziff Davis Media

  • How about a more realistic review... (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:02PM (#4828736)
    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.

  • dead in the water? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by MiTEG ( 234467 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:02PM (#4828741) Homepage Journal
    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.
    • nVidia has all the OEM's wrapped around their little finger these days. Try to show me a Dell, Gateway, or HP with Trident video, everyone I've seen has Intel Extreme (belch) or more likely a GF4 MX (yuck).

      ATI's been getting quite a few of them back though with the 9000s being cheaper than a GF4MX and performing much better in comparison. But Trident doesnt have a market anymore. They had a laptop one up til the mobile GF4s and Radeons, but they dont even have that anymore.
    • What really matters is what chipset would the OEM have used if this cheapo chipset wasn't arround. If the OEM are the really cheap ones, they will probably use this to replace the old savage chipsets and the likes. If it's a "second-cheapest" OEM they will probably be using ATI bottom line chipsets.

      So, people buying the cheapest motherboards on earth are benefiting. And that includes many of my friends or people I know.

      Yes, they can try to buy a separate ATI card, or go for a better motherboard with more decent card, but at least you have a basic right there in your cheapo initial buy. If you never make it to buy the radeon 9500, then at least you have something (that is in fact faster than ANY card of two years ago).

      I mean, people that buy latest-greatest are paying $300 for the privilege of running the cards the rest of the world have two years ahead (Not saying it's not worth, but time is the key here, not crap/cool). At some point I payed extra to have it BEFORE (couldn't wait, Voodoo could really do things no other could do) but I do not feel so pressed now. So welcome back Trident!

  • They compared it against a G4 4200 and a R9500. Shouldn't they have looked at a R7500 or mobile G 420/440 to be in the same price ballpark (~$100)?

  • incorrect comparison? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by magarity ( 164372 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:03PM (#4828745)
    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.
    • Didn't the article state that this is a mobile computing graphics card. This just makes it an even more unfare comparison.

      If my laptop had my Geforce Ti 4200 inside it, it would not only be a furnace -- it would put an early demise to my chances of having children!! ;-)

      • No, the XP4 T2 is a desktop chip. The article mentioned there will be a mobile variant XP4 T1 available soon. But I agree with you and others that it is unfair to compare it against Ti4200 and ATI Radeon 9500 Pro. Trident traditionally targeted the low-cost range of the market. So it is likely targeting the ~$50 segment while the other 2 cards are mid-range products.
    • Well, the GPU isn't ready for release. So by the time it hits the market, it may be competing, price-wise, with offerings from ATi and nVidia that perform similar to the cards they benchmarked it against. Of course, if Trident can increase performance a bit and keep the price down, they'll no doubt capture a good portion of the low-end market. That is, assuming ATi and nVidia aren't preparing similar products...
    • Radeon 9000 Pro, 128 MB, $99 [newegg.com]

      Laughing to the bank with that there? Or how about this: GF4 Ti4200 64 MB for $127 [newegg.com]

      Laughing all the way into Bankruptcy is more like it.

      *Note: I dont work for newegg, I just buy everything there

    • There was no point comparing a card targetted at the sub-100 market against boards in the $400-500 market.

      Budget cards sell to budget markets, which means a 17" monitor that will do 1280x1024x75Hz with some degree of acceptability. Testing performance at 1600x1200 was pointless for this market.

      This chipset is designed for a market where the whole system (less monitor) is selling for prices comparable to top of the line NVidia and ATI cards. It's not intended to compete with those cards, but to provide a tolerable experience on a cheap system.

      • The boards being compared are in the roughly $100 market. Unless the Trident chipset hits the sub $50 integrator market, they're DOA.

  • Since when has Trident put out any videocard that didn't suck? Even in their prime, their chips were pretty bottom-of-the-barrel.. Like pre-Rage128 ATI, they never would have had any of the market if it weren't for the fact that they supplied cheap OEM solutions for bargain PCs.
  • OK is it just me or does this thing sound DOA they need to get the clock up there to start comparing. Granted they may sell a ton of them for laptops and office PC's where 3 watts of heat and power makes it a nice offering for the speed that it does have. Dependant on how much MS pushes games to DX9 I'm sure they may sell a lot of there as upgrades at compusa and best buy it looks good on paper but thats about it.
  • 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?
    • Huh,

      You brought a crap Trident PCI video card for a crap price, then have the balls to complain that modern video cards are all crap. And with no explaination or proof of your conclusion. LOL

      Despite the fact that:
      1) The 2d acceleration on modern AGP cards is vastly better than and old Trident provided.
      2) The 3d acceleration on even really cheap Nvidia cards is enough to power any game.
      3) You even get TV out for free on cheap GF4 MX.

      You can even get a GF4 MX440 for about $50, which barely costs more than your old PCI card.

      Since I have fallen for a troll, I'll shut up now!
  • (first, a note to story submitters - when possible, link to the printable link version of the story. It is SO much nicer to read.)

    Ouchie! Man, I wonder if Trident will EVER let these guys review ANYTHING again!

    I hope, for the sake of the engineers at Trident, that there was some major D'OH! in the code, and that this isn't where their product really falls.

  • Geez, take a hint... (Score:3, Funny)

    by clubin ( 542806 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:14PM (#4828786)

    ... from the lack of posts. Don't you know we're oly interested in Microsoft's failed projects [microsoft.com]?

    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. -_-

  • Hmm... (Score:2, Funny)

    by flatface ( 611167 )
    That was a pretty bad review.. Matrox tried to "clean up the floor with nVidia and ATI" too and failed. At least they made a better attempt than Trident.

    I have a spare 2mb Trident in my P-75 that may compete with the XP4...
    • I can do better. I have the ultimate Oxymoron:

      The Trident '3DImage' hasn't had Direct3D drivers since Windows 95.

      So I've got a "3D" card that's limited to DirectDraw. Not that I'd want to ( it runs DX5 games at about 10fps ). Obviously, a 3D core this slow was not worth perpetuation.

      But I will say one thing for Trident: although their older ISA cards were sluggish, I've found their later cards ( 3DImage and Blade3D ) to have clear and responsive 2D. So maybe they can eventually figure this whole 3D Accelerator thing out...

  • More of an error on the part of Trident marketing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Ryu2 ( 89645 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:20PM (#4828820) Homepage Journal
    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.

  • Losing sight of the target (Score:5, Insightful)

    by TinyManCan ( 580322 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:20PM (#4828824) Homepage
    You gotta love reviews like this. First he takes a product that is meant to go into *budget* *low-end* machines, and compares it to the upper echelon of *no cost spared* performance.

    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

    • Re:Losing sight of the target (Score:4, Informative)

      by be-fan ( 61476 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:38PM (#4828995)
      People who know nothing shouldn't speak. The card was tested against a bunch of budget/midrange cards. On the low-end, the Radeon 9000 Pro starts at $80, while the "high-end" Radeon 9500 Pro goes all the way to $150. As for drivers, it could very well be that these drivers suck royally. But if they're this bad this late in the game, then what's Trident doing sending them out for review? Also, it must be noted that ATI's drivers aren't that great either, and that lots of beta drivers get tested (they are 'beta' not 'internal release' after all) and almost always they perform 50-70% as well as the final ones. So this card will get (at best) maybe 20 fps at 1024x768 with final drivers.

    • Re:Losing sight of the target (Score:4, Informative)

      by Pulzar ( 81031 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:40PM (#4829011)
      I think you're just being uninformed, and on top of it, you didn't read the article that you're criticizing.

      Making a quick visit to the pricewatch would show you that Radeon 9000 Pro, which is one of the cards XP4 was being compared to, can be found for $81.

      That's exactly the price target XP4 is going for, and it is performing less than 50% below R9000 Pro.

      The review even talks about the driver issue, and how fully optimized drivers give another 20-30% performance improvement, which still won't be enough to reach the level of the competition.

      • R9000 is a DirectX 8.1 part. XP4 is a DirectX 9.0 part.

        To execute 9.0 pixel shaders, the R9000 would have to render everything in software. Likewise, to execute 9.0 vertex shaders coupled with 8.1 pixel shaders, the R9000 would still have to calculate the vertex shaders in software. This is slow, and not always supported. (Some games don't work with software vertex shaders.) So this isn't a good comparison at all.
    • 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.

      Debugged drivers or not, Trident claimed that the GPU had 80% of the performance of the Geforce 4 Ti 4600. With those claims, it should perform better than the ~5 FPS even at the high resolutions despite the drivers.

      I bet you that same card will belt out over 60fps at 1024x768 when the real drivers are released.

      I'll prolly belt out over 60 FPS in a heated game of Solitaire.

  • PR: It has come to our attention that many of our customers and critics are not satisfied with the review of our product as we previously shipped to them and received with deafed [engrish.com] ears. The staff of www.extremetech.com have mis-interpreted Trident's XP4 product and have mis-applied our technology. In our initial PR Announcment of the XP4, we were received by listeners that our product will whipe-out the competition. Despite our best efforts to contact the staff of www.extremetech.com before they released the results, we have received much criticism and have now been given opportunity to make clear our statements. Our initial PR statment confirms that our product was not intended to whipe-out the competition; we meant that the XP4 will whipe the ass of our competitors. We understand the definite language barrier of our PR staff and the general international public. Over the past 6 months, Trident has become one of the greatest suppliers of industrial sand paper and the most abrasive toilette paper in the history of indoor plumbing of developed nations. The Trident XP4 is intended to provide the most dis-comfort in our competitors as its only use is to whipe their ass in the most abrasive fassion possible. We thankyou for your concern and please feel free to purchase more of Trident's innovative products.

    I thought this information should be re-layed to the slashdot community as it clears-up much of the incorrectly perceived statements. You know what happens with the SNAFU theorom these days...

    Sincerily,
    Bob Grover

    • So they're going to kill their competition by "whipeing their ass" with extremely "abrasive toilette paper?"

    • Our initial PR statment confirms that our product was not intended to whipe-out the competition; we meant that the XP4 will whipe the ass of our competitors. We understand the definite language barrier of our PR staff and the general international public. Over the past 6 months, Trident has become one of the greatest suppliers of industrial sand paper and the most abrasive toilette paper in the history of indoor plumbing of developed nations. The Trident XP4 is intended to provide the most dis-comfort in our competitors as its only use is to whipe their ass in the most abrasive fassion possible.

      So what you're saying is your product will be covered in the blood and shit of your competitors? NO THANKS!

      Also if your competitors are wiping their asses with your product, whether or not it's uncomfortable, they are still using your product to wipe their asses with...which is still bad!

      PS I think your PR personel are suppose to be good at the whole general public/language barrier kinda thing. It may be a good time to get some new people in there...

  • DX9 class? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by UberLame ( 249268 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:37PM (#4828982) Homepage
    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 think my old Tseng ET4000 would have smoked this thing.

  • I need a 2ghz computer to run Word.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Yo Grark ( 465041 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @06:40PM (#4829016)
    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
    • Most didn't notice that they compared it to desktop cards, when the GPU is designed for mobile computing.

      I wonder how it stacks up against the S4 Savage, NoForce, mobile Radeon or intels Xtreme grafx.

      I mean "GPU designed for laptop not as cool as desktop gaming cards!" is kind of a no-shit conclusion.

  • Just summing up what I've read so far... (Score:5, Informative)

    by Salubri ( 618957 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @07:09PM (#4829278) Journal
    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.

    • exactly!

      if you don't mind, i would like to add more to what you said.

      How many people in the market for a sub 100$ card are going to be running at 1600x1200 in the first place?
      How many people in the market for a sub 100$ card are going to have PIV 3.06 gHz cpus?

      This card is meant primarily for budget computers. Yes, it will probably list for 99$ but on the day they are released, I bet they will be going for ~70$ on pricewatch. Sure, a Geforce 4 Ti4200 is ~120$ and the ATI 9000 is ~100$, but for a person running a Duron 1.2 gHz, spending an extra 50$ on a chip for a 15" or 17" monitor that can only max out on 1280x1024 is a waste of money.

      This was a HORRIBLE review by extremetech. I mean, what were they thinking? "Let's review a sub 100$ video card with video cards that cost ~300$ when they first came out"? "Hey! let's review this BUDGET card at 1600x1200 with BETA drivers!"

      On a side note, I wonder how much power this chipset will use up? The notebook version may wipe the floor with the big two in the notebook arena with decent performance and great power consumption.

  • invidia demos (Score:2, Interesting)

    by SniffleBear ( 604984 )
    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.
    • You contradict yourself here. You say that the demos are impractical because there is more than one object on screen at once in the game, which is true. However, then you claim that an old card can do the same demo. If the old card COULD do the new demo at useful speed, the new card would be able to do multiple objects of that complexity, making the demo useful. Or are you saying the new card isn't any more powerful?

  • no surprise (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Yeah, so the Trident XP4 sucks. Well, what do you expect from a company that is mainly known for making sugarless chewing gum...
  • When I was in my early teens, I had the exquisite misfortune to be the owner of a series of Trident cards, starting with the TVGA8900C. Holy crap, what a smoking pile that thing was. I then upgraded to another card (I can't remember the model number) that was a 32-bit ISA card (remember those?)! It was a hair faster than the 8900, but the fucking thing wouldn't work with Linux. More recently, I had a buddy with a Trident card in his budget computer (made an E-Machine look like a friggin Cray) and that blew too.

    Now is the perfect opportunity for Trident to re-invent itself! Or, more likely, now is the time for Trident to come up with another crappy video card.
    • You know, until I experienced a Triden 8900, I never knew that a videocard could be a bottleneck for 80x25 text... It makes reading log files FUN!

      "Scotty, we need to scroll more than 1 screen per second"
      "Captain, I'm giving her all she's got. Any more and she'll start to get warm!"
      "Sulu, set the phasers to freeze!"
  • Judging from the benchmarks, including the fill rate, I think there's probably something terminally wrong with the current silicon or drivers. Hopefully this will be worked out before the product ships.

    I say this because it seems odd that a card running at a reasonable clock speed with reasonably fast ram should run so slowly on fill-rate tests.
  • at least they're still doing okay selling gum [tridentgum.com].
  • The Matrox Parhelia got some pretty bad reviews too. Matrox tried to get back into the market, and it seems like they're failing. The Parhelia is more expensive than speedier cards from nVidia and ATI, and it seems like a lame card to me. Why do they bother selling the bloody thing?
  • For all the issues with XP4 driver performance today, I have no doubt the Trident folks will improve it just like all other competitors in the past .... Although the XP4 T3 with 128MBytes is listed at $99 MSRP, I would venture to guess that you will be able to buy it next month for less than $85, and next May 2003 for less than $60 (still with 128MBytes of course). Trident's main value to MOST of us (working consumers with LIMITED income) is their RELENTLESS competitive drive to bring down the cost of high-quality graphics (which so far only affordable to the elite few) starting with DX8.1 today and DX9.0 next summer. So here is my cautious forecast .... Next August 2003, Trident offering will include a full DX9.0 card with 256MBytes XP8 for $99 and a full DX8.1 card with 128MBytes XP4 for $59 - all will support the latest AGP-8X of course. This is why (I think) the OEMs, system integrators, retailers and distributors are so excited about Trident return to the desktop market. As a final note, in case you did not know .... It was a mere 45 days ago that the ATI 9000 Pro was selling for $149 with 128MBytes and everyone thought it was a GREAT price ! With Trident XP4 entering the 128Mbytes market with an incredible $99 MSRP, the 9000 Pro price has quickly dropped 33% or more to $99 and below ! I firmly believe that for us consumers, the surest way to get "the best deal in town" is by encouring more intense competition and not by killing it ...

  • This card was not MEANT for the cutting edge gamer (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Maul ( 83993 ) on Friday December 06, 2002 @10:27PM (#4830428) Journal
    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.
  • why are they benching it against Desktop GPU's, obviously no matter what the laptop GPU the equivilent class GPU would always be better. Why don't you atleast bench it against mobile GPUs.
  • In all my life i have yet to see a competitive trident on the market. For the same money a Trident costs you could buy a Geforce 2 or 3 and those are a lot better.
  • Okay, yes, 1600x1200 is unrealistic to benchmark this bargain basement chip. But, DX9 is nothing to sneeze at. It's Renderman [pixar.com] in realtime people. Sure this chip may do great on games already released, but what about DX9 games coming down the pike in the next 90 days? Personally, I wouldn't buy it if it can't cut it for at least 180 days. (Extreme for Slashdot readership, yes, but hey, my Nissan's got 110,000 miles on it). Me thinks this Trident chip is DX9 compatible in name only.

  • Review shows extremetech's ignorance of XP4 (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Kaizyn ( 174682 ) on Saturday December 07, 2002 @02:21AM (#4831339)
    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.

  • mainstream... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Barbarian ( 9467 ) on Saturday December 07, 2002 @04:34AM (#4831661)
    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.
  • Oh boy, like i needed a benchmark to tell me a trident card isn't the fastest around. Trident vga cards, conner hard drives and pcchips mb's are all part of my traumatic pc past. Everybody avoided those things like the plague. They came standard in the cheapest pc's money could buy, and that was the only thing they were good for. (even though the products with a higher quality weren't that much higher in price, they we worth it because you had less problems in the end.)
  • The following quote is from page 4-27 of the MSCP Basic Disk Functions
    Manual which is part of the UDA50 Programmers Doc Kit manuals:

    As stated above, the host area of a disk is structured as a vector of
    logical blocks. From a performance viewpoint, however, it is more
    appropriate to view the host area as a four dimensional hyper-cube, the
    four dimensions being cylinder, group, track, and sector.
    . . .
    Referring to our hyper-cube analogy, the set of potentially accessible
    blocks form a line parallel to the track axis. This line moves
    parallel to the sector axis, wrapping around when it reaches the edge
    of the hyper-cube.

    - this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...

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