info about Trident's XP4

I totally agree. It is very exciting! I am no expert in how TBR's work, but provided that it has good drivers and is as efficient as the Kyro design, it should do more than just get up to 80% of a Ti4600's performance, right?

IMHO, this is almost as exciting as the R300 or the NV30, simply cause it has the potential to bring the budget (mainstream) market up a few notches! The truth is, only a few will ever purchase a Radeon 9700 or a top end NV30, whereas millions will purchase a budget card. So, if a budget card can perform like a Ti4600 by years end, that would be awesome!

After all, it is the mainstream market that games are designed to run on, so this is definitely a step in the right direction, and hopefully a sign of things to come. Now, all they need is some major OEM wins to get the ball rolling.

Please don't tell me that a GeForce3 Ti200 is a budget card!. I am talking about OEM level, where I can walk in to a major computer store, buy a Compaq or any big brand pc and go home and play the latest games comfortably. Sure, you may not get the same eye-candy as you would on a R300 or NV30, but you get the point. Like I said before, if this happens by Christmas than its better for us.

Don't get me wrong, I am not a Trident fan (imagine that!), I don't care who does it, but some has to raise the bar in the mainstream market.

Fuz

 

I wonder if this chip will be like the Xabre one in that it uses Software Vertex Processing for its' Vertex Shaders.

Otherwise, it could be a very good contender to the Radeon 9000.

 

Interesting, but there are far too many unknowns, including:

1. Overall image quality
2. Drivers (I have approximately zero confidence in Trident's driver abilities...)
3. Anisotropic filtering performance/image quality
4. FSAA performance/image quality
5. CPU usage.
6. T&L power (It appears to have no T&L unit...so this is almost certainly going to be very poor).
7. Is the PS implementation 100% compatible? Version number? (1.0, 1.1, 1.3, 1.4?)

 

From Trident:

XP4 BrightPixelTM is Trident's state-of-the-art 3D graphics rendering engine which implements in hardware all features of the Microsoft’s latest DirectX 8.1 graphics standard for Windows operating systems. XP4 BrightPixelTM engine includes both fully programmable Vertex Shader and Pixel Shader, enabling 3D graphics programmers to individually color each pixel uniquely at maximum performance.

 

Here are a couple of details on Talisman from SIGGRAPH 96' :

http://www.ecsl.cs.sunysb.edu/cse659/talisman.html

 

I think the XP4 is really interesting! I like the TBR-concept (i have a KyroII ) and as a full DX8.1-capable tile based chip the XP4 is likely to be my new graficscard (as long the drivers are good and performance is ok).
I wish PowerVR had released such a card. These XP4-Specs i had in mind for Kyro3 . I hope PowerVR is back again with full DX9-capable Series 5 1/2 quater 2003!

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