I recently had a chance to interview Le T. Nguyen of Trident, where I asked a slew of questions about the Trident XP4 chip. I'll post a few bits of interest that might be of interest. I got some more info out of them not posted yet because of time constraints but I'll try to post those here later, is 12:30AM here right now 
. Read more here http://www.hardwareaccelerated.com/articles/reviews/graphics/tridentinterview/ and tell me what you guys think of the interview+the site if you can.
How exactly does the XP4 use these 4 pixel pipes? We know that each pipeline isn't identical like in most chips in the past, are these pixel pipes functionally identical to the competition? Any performance loss with such a design? What resources are shared among them? Do the shaders work in a similar fashion?
The XP4 employs advanced mathematics that specifically optimizes for multiple pixel rendering and results in unprecedented transistor savings. As an illustration, the XP4 requires 15 million transistors for the first pixel pipe, 7.5 million for the second pipe, 3.8 million for the third pipe and 2 million for the fourth pipe. The total is roughly 30 million transistors for all 4 pipes, as compared to NVIDIA’s design which required over 60 million transistors in GeForce4 Ti 4600. The performance compromise is not much (20%) and is totally acceptable to 97% of the 3D graphics users. Please note that there is no compromise in functionality or feature set, i.e. full support for DirectX8.1 and Base support for Direct 9.0. I know your readers want much more technical details of our trade secrets, but we all have real families to support here, so we must apologize for our lack of forthcoming in this area. Please forgive our sense of secrecy.
- . Of course, Trident will bring out our very exciting DirectX 9.0 product in ample time for Xmas ’03 as well.
-The XP4 does not support Pixel and Vertex shaders 2.0, as they are part of the Full set of DirectX 9.0 standard. However, we do support displacement mapping as the Base feature of DirectX 9.0
-It was stated that you would come within ~80% of NVIDIA's latest graphics card performance wise, is this based on benchmarks (if so which?), polygon rate, or some other indicator?
Our performance target for the XP4 T3 is 80% of GeForce4 Ti 4600 over the majority of industry-standard benchmarks that are commonly used by popular magazines and websites.
If anyone has any more questions they'd like me to ask Trident, email me or just post them here and I'll ask them later.
. Read more here http://www.hardwareaccelerated.com/articles/reviews/graphics/tridentinterview/ and tell me what you guys think of the interview+the site if you can. How exactly does the XP4 use these 4 pixel pipes? We know that each pipeline isn't identical like in most chips in the past, are these pixel pipes functionally identical to the competition? Any performance loss with such a design? What resources are shared among them? Do the shaders work in a similar fashion?
The XP4 employs advanced mathematics that specifically optimizes for multiple pixel rendering and results in unprecedented transistor savings. As an illustration, the XP4 requires 15 million transistors for the first pixel pipe, 7.5 million for the second pipe, 3.8 million for the third pipe and 2 million for the fourth pipe. The total is roughly 30 million transistors for all 4 pipes, as compared to NVIDIA’s design which required over 60 million transistors in GeForce4 Ti 4600. The performance compromise is not much (20%) and is totally acceptable to 97% of the 3D graphics users. Please note that there is no compromise in functionality or feature set, i.e. full support for DirectX8.1 and Base support for Direct 9.0. I know your readers want much more technical details of our trade secrets, but we all have real families to support here, so we must apologize for our lack of forthcoming in this area. Please forgive our sense of secrecy.
- . Of course, Trident will bring out our very exciting DirectX 9.0 product in ample time for Xmas ’03 as well.
-The XP4 does not support Pixel and Vertex shaders 2.0, as they are part of the Full set of DirectX 9.0 standard. However, we do support displacement mapping as the Base feature of DirectX 9.0
-It was stated that you would come within ~80% of NVIDIA's latest graphics card performance wise, is this based on benchmarks (if so which?), polygon rate, or some other indicator?
Our performance target for the XP4 T3 is 80% of GeForce4 Ti 4600 over the majority of industry-standard benchmarks that are commonly used by popular magazines and websites.
If anyone has any more questions they'd like me to ask Trident, email me or just post them here and I'll ask them later.
