Trident XP4-boy, did they ever blow it

[K6-III]

Yeah, but Trident XP4 wouldn't be going into top-of-the-line anyhow...

[the maddman]

Hopefully it's just immature drivers and a unfinished board. I actually have a MetaByte Wicked3D with Oak Techs. 3D chip on it. First off it sucked, big time, but after a bios update and some updated drivers, Direct3D was pretty slick on it. 800x600 with 4x antialiasing was pretty slick for a 4meg EDO memory card.

[rugger]

Ah.... hahahahaha

Its a trident board. It sucks because trident have always sucked. Let me recap:

1) Their ISA boards stank! (They were among the slowest unaccellerated ISA video cards around)
2) Their PCI boards stank! (They were beaten into a pulp by no other then the low end S3 chipsets)
3) Their AGP boards so far stink! (The earlier ones were slow, the later ones, while faster, are still slow as mollassas)

Sorry, but if you were expecting them to pull a rabbit out of the hat, think again

Motto: Trident, slow cards, for slow people

[Chrono_Wanderer]

hehehe... trident makes DX9 cards? haha. probably after 10 years when we are using holographic panels

i was expecting a lot from XP4 ... i think it's the "pre-alpha" drivers they have... and after all it's a laptop chip and 1600x1200 is just like telling a Tsang labs chip running workstation graphics

[Marshmallowman]

Its a tiler so there is probably a lot of room for improvement software wise..but it still seeems to suck.

Maybe they might crank the clocks up a fair bit?, it is alpha silicon!...who I am kidding , at least they are consistent

[Slougi]

Originally posted by Marshmallowman
Its a tiler so there is probably a lot of room for improvement software wise..but it still seeems to suck.

It's not a tiler.

[roadie]

i have a dell inspiron 8200 with a 15" uxga ultrasharp screen. i run it at 1600*1200 with small fonts in windows and it is absolutely razor sharp, it is awesome. however i use 1024*768 in all games. it uses a gf440go which has pretty decent performance

[rubank]

Not that I have any high hopes for Trident (their PR hype was quite amusing though),
but come on guys, this is a really bad review. It raises more questions than it answers. Not even Anand or THG would make it this bad.

rubank

[Technoid]

Originally posted by rubank
Not that I have any high hopes for Trident (their PR hype was quite amusing though),
but come on guys, this is a really bad review. It raises more questions than it answers. Not even Anand or THG would make it this bad.

rubank

Agreed, they should have tested a lot more resolutions.....

[Chrono_Wanderer]

well, i dun trust most hardware sites/magazines these days. all i trust is MURC lol

About Slougi's link to anandtech... i saw that quite a while back also. the benchies show that the XP4 is almost on par with the Desktop 9000 PRO... which is quite impressive for a labtop chipset. personally i trust anandtech a lot more than extremetech (not that i trust anandtech tho), and expesically in this case: what benefit does anandtech gain if they side a "small" company like trident? (unless money involvement which does not seem like the case coz they would rather side nV/ATI who is obviously richer than tridant... if my logic is right) Besides, to bench only 1600x1200 is quite unprofessional IMO, even if their intention is to replace FSAA. I mean, most review w/benchmarks also do 1024x768 w/out AA also...)

[Marshmallowman]

Slougi it is Tile based.

Some months back, Trident made much ado about its new DX9-class GPU that would take the mobile computing world by storm. The XP4, a 30-million transistor tile-based architecture with hardware pixel shaders, was supposed to mop up the floor with ATI and nVidia. At least, that's what Trident's overly exuberant marketing spin claimed.

from:

http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,3973,746426,00.asp

[bsdgeek]

The XP4 has long been rumored to be a tile-based rendering solution like STMicro's Kyro II and as intriguing as deferred rendering technologies are, you won't find any such technology in the XP4. Instead, the XP4 is a conventional immediate-mode renderer like the GeForce4 or Radeon 9700 but with a tile-based rasterization engine. All this means is that the XP4 uses a tile-based algorithm for storing pixels in its frame buffer; so instead of writing lines of pixel data to the frame buffer the XP4 writes the data in blocks/tiles. The XP4's tile-based rasterizer is much like Intel's 845G graphics core in this respect, and the main reason behind it is to optimize for the XP4's internal caches. The end result is improved memory bandwidth efficiency, which helps tremendously considering that the XP4 has no real occlusion culling technology.

From AnandTech

[Marshmallowman]

so we are both wrong