Trident XP4 - New Card On The Block

[MournSanity]

Anand posted a story about this new card(or series of cards). It looks like Trident is trying capture the sub $100 market. If these cards are as good as they say they are, this could cause card prices to drop dramatically.

Check it out here.

From Anandtech:

• 0.13-micron GPU clocked at 250 - 300MHz

• 30 million transistors

• 4 pixel rendering pipelines, 2 texture units per pipeline

• 2 programmable vect4 vertex shader pipelines

• 64/128-bit DDR memory bus

• up to 256MB of memory on board, clocked at 250 - 350MHz (500 - 700MHz DDR)

• Tile-based rasterization engine

• AGP 4X Support

• Full DX8.1 Pixel and Vertex Shader Support with a base level of DirectX 9 support

The Trident XP4 T3 will run at a 300MHz core clock and come with 128MB of memory. The T3 has a 128-bit DDR memory bus and will be paired with 300 - 350MHz DDR memory (effectively 600 - 700MHz). This will give cards based on the T3 between 9.6GB/s and 11.2GB/s of memory bandwidth. Trident is expecting performance of the T3 to come within 80% of a GeForce4 Ti 4600. Retail graphics cards based on the T3 with 128MB of memory will be priced at $99.


The XP4 T2 is identical to the T3 except it only has 64MB of 250MHz DDR memory (effectively 500MHz) and has a 250MHz core clock. The reduced memory clock gives the T2 only 8GB/s of memory bandwidth. The T2 will retail for $79.


The XP4 T1 is identical to the T2 except it only has a 64-bit memory bus (cutting memory bandwidth in half) and will retail for $69.


God that's sweet...

 

[bunnyfubbles]

Trident won't have much trouble in that market if they can pull off the performance they say they can deliver. Heck, a card that is 4/5 a Ti 4600 for 1/3 to 1/4 the cost, lol, it is really hard to lose there. We'll just have to wait and see how well the XP4 does upon debut...

 

[Swanny]

Cool, another tile renderer, I always liked that concept.

Let's hope this one sells more than the Kyro II did!

 

[EdipisReks]

Originally posted by: Swanny
Cool, another tile renderer, I always liked that concept.

Let's hope this one sells more than the Kyro II did!

read the article. it's not a tile based renderer.

 

[Mr.IncrediblyBored]

Originally posted by: Swanny
Cool, another tile renderer, I always liked that concept.

Let's hope this one sells more than the Kyro II did!

The XP4 isn't a tile renderer in the same sense as the Kyro series. From Anandtech's article:

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.

Apparently this is not a new feature at all, and has been used in old video cards before this one. Text

 

[BlvdKing]

I think the real potential of the XP4 chip is in laptops. I have always been reluctant to buy a gaming laptop because of the Radeon Mobility 7500 and the GeForce 2/4 GO chips (price as well). They just aren't enough for alot of games out today, or tomorrow. The XP4 being DX 8.1 compliant helps as well.

 

[Deeko]

The specs are very impressive. If they can pull off the speeds they claim, and at the prices they claim, that would be incredible, and maybe OEM's would have a decent video card in their computers for once. However, I'm a little doubtul of the 80% performance of the Ti4600, but I suppose we will just have to wait and see.