Trident: "XP4 T3 will achieve 70% of Radeon 9700 perf&q

[Pete]

That's not all he said:

Le: In summary, we think it is such a waste of money to buy NVIDIA and ATI products and I personally consider what they are doing as highway robbery of the 21st century and must be stopped immediately. We will set a new and FAIR price/performance standard and stay committed to bringing real values to all 3D graphics lovers.

The key quote, IMO:

GD: How are you able to perform many of the functions your competition does on such a small chip (only 30 million transistors)?

Le: The secret is in the mathematics of multiple-pixel rendering. Our advanced 3D graphics algorithm is optimized for rendering multiple pixels in parallel by intelligent sharing of pixel rendering hardware at strategic stages in the graphics rendering pipelines.

So, is this SIMD in GPUs, or just their "tile-based rasterization engine" in action? Is SIMD already implemented in GPUs?

http://www.gamersdepot.com/interviews/trident/xp4/001.htm

Talk amongst yourselves.

[Edit: Rrg, can't get an end " to work, it keeps turning into an &.]

 

[Nappe1]

I read that interview too, but didn't bother to post it here, because I thought everyone saw it already.

there is quite many agressive comments on that interview. Somewhere he talks about how nVidia and ATI will react and he thinks that nVidia or ATI will try to capture their company after the XP4 T3 launch via stock market!

so either they really have jewel on their hands or then their marketing department has gone totally nuts!

 

[Pete]

Yep, forgot to include the "poison pill" comment, possibly the most barbed reply in the whole bitter interview.

I thought people could at least get a laugh out of it.

 

[rubank]

Even if I didn´t lol I was quite amused when I read that interview a couple of days ago. My thought was more along the line: what if they actually deliver!?
Think about it, it coud really shake things, and I sure wouldn´t mind lower prices.
70% of a 9700 at under 100 bucks? Are you kidding me? I´d jump at it right away (provided the output is tolerable). For $90 I´d settle for 50% of a 9700

rubank

 

[Nagorak]

I honestly hope they deliver!

 

[Nappe1]

Even if I didn´t lol I was quite amused when I read that interview a couple of days ago. My thought was more along the line: what if they actually deliver!?
Think about it, it coud really shake things, and I sure wouldn´t mind lower prices.
70% of a 9700 at under 100 bucks? Are you kidding me? I´d jump at it right away (provided the output is tolerable). For $90 I´d settle for 50% of a 9700

rubank

I am definately with you.
would that mean time to start TURC?
How would Ant like that?

 

[Pete]

rubank, I'd certainly love it if Trident could deliver on their promises, but with 30 mil transistors? Well, we'll see.

 

[Geeforcer]

Our performance target for XP4 T3 is 70 percent of ATI's latest R300, and 80 percent of NVidia's GeForce4 Ti 4600.

I'd really like to know what these numbers are based on. Are these theoretical numbers like fillrate or polygon throughput, or are they based on a benchmark (then I'd like to know what application and settings they are using).

If XP4 is delivers 70% of R300 AND 80% of Ti4600 performance, that would mean that Ti4600 delivers 87.5% of R300 performance - unless either 4600 magically got much faster of R300 somehow got much slower in the last couple of weeks, this is simply not the case in any non-CPU limited 3D benchmark.

 

[rubank]

Nappe1,
if you start the TURC I want to be an honorary member

(but I guess you won´t have time for TURC, you´ll be busy with BURC )

rubank

 

[Richthofen]

probably he just states performance without FSAA and AF.

In that case it is not that difficult to reach the performance of a Ti4600 or R300 especially in CPU limited games.
But who cares about that?

FSAA and AF is already standard. If they do not deliver that with acceptable performance the reviewers will destroy their chip on the PR front. That's it.

 

[Nappe1]

Nappe1,
if you start the TURC I want to be an honorary member

(but I guess you won´t have time for TURC, you´ll be busy with BURC )

rubank

heheh hopefully there will be BURK someday... but right now founding it would be suicide.

and Rubank, there is already a group of ppl joined together so, generally 'BURK' already exists (name is different though.), but because of obious reasons, we have stayed underground so far. (actually over a year now.)

okay, enough of this offtopic.

 

[Nappe1]

Our performance target for XP4 T3 is 70 percent of ATI's latest R300, and 80 percent of NVidia's GeForce4 Ti 4600.

I'd really like to know what these numbers are based on. Are these theoretical numbers like fillrate or polygon throughput, or are they based on a benchmark (then I'd like to know what application and settings they are using).

If XP4 is delivers 70% of R300 AND 80% of Ti4600 performance, that would mean that Ti4600 delivers 87.5% of R300 performance - unless either 4600 magically got much faster of R300 somehow got much slower in the last couple of weeks, this is simply not the case in any non-CPU limited 3D benchmark.

my guess is that they are talking about 3DMark performance. in that case, default benchmark would give aproximately something between 0.80 * Ti4600 Score and 0.70 * Radeon 9700 Score (14000 would mean 9800.) with XP4 T3 on high end system.

wheeh... that's the way to speculate... how many 'ifs' you can find from above??

 

[rubank]

Well, according to Anand it runs UT 2003 with respectable performance, that should account for something (- even if I don´t want to draw any deeper conclusions on that).

I guess we´ll just have to wait for the numbers.

 

[Nagorak]

FSAA and AF is already standard. If they do not deliver that with acceptable performance the reviewers will destroy their chip on the PR front. That's it.

In a value card?

Yeah right... That's the standard for the high end, no one is going to care whether an el-cheapo value card can run with FSAA and AF

 

[demalion]

On the one hand, I don't think they need to support FSAA, and their texture filtering just has to be tolerable (really, general consumers don't seem to understand terms like "anisotropic" and "trilinear" and won't generally notice the difference EDIT: well, not and recognize what is causing it) as opposed to what the Xabre previews indicated were default.

On the other, I do not for one minute buy the "fully supporting DX 9 in hardware" from that interview...it sounds like a miscommunication or subtle miswording, especially when they talk about the GF4 and DX 9 in a similar way...it just seems to be marketing speak for saying "you can use DX 9 on this hardware" (true for about any videocard with drivers still being made) not "you can fully expose the DX 9 featureset on this hardware".

But, for those prices, they don't have to.

I do think that even a hint that they can run UT 2003, and not run it poorly, is promising. Also, it is pretty obvious, as has been stated, that "80%" of "some other card" is a completely meaningless figure without stating the conditions...so the UT 2003 comment is the one that is most significant to me (though details are still needed).

Seems to me that the article was a sales pitch through and through, which seems to be establishing itself as a tradition, but as long as they deliver something reasonably close to a fair expectation from their claims, I think their mindshare grabbing attempts are tolerable for their situation for now.

 

[Onslaught]

About the DX9 thing...
According to Trident's home page the chips do contain DX9 hardware.

See this link: Trident's home page

 

[pascal]

If they deliver only 50% of R300 with DX9 at this price level then I will be happy. He really need an installed base urgentlly.

 

[Gollum]

For those too lazy to follow the link (thx onslaught), here's a snip:

Trident Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ:TRID), is unveiling its desktop XP4â„¢ 3D graphics family setting a new price/performance standard for Microsoft's DX8.1/9.0-compliant graphics cards for less than $100, with 128MBytes of up to 700MHz DDR memory.

The DX8.1/9.0 statement is all over that page, I really want to know more details about this chip, about time for some in-depth tech p/reviews! Now what does compliance mean again, IIRC it does mean more than just "compatibility", you need to have features in hardware in order to be compliant, right? Aww my head hurts...

What I found entertaining is the fact that their PR department sure knows their stuff, fancy names for everything: BrightPixelâ„¢ rendering engine, SmartTileâ„¢ memory architecture and CoolPowerâ„¢ for low power management...

 

[KnightBreed]

Whoa, that interview reads like something given by Bubba back in the 3dfx days.

 

[BoddoZerg]

80% of Ti4600 and 70% of Radeon9700 performance probably is running (original) Unreal Tournament at 800*600. kekeke.