As we have recently found out, Trident, which has been offering notebook graphics solutions until recently, is going to start working in the desktop 3D accelerators market as well. At present, NVIDIA own 41% of the market, ATI has 21%, and 14% belong to Intel due to their integrated solutions. The remaining 23% are split between SiS, VIA-S3, STM and the rest. Trident hope that they will be able to become a worthy competitor to the latter manufacturers, producing graphics accelerators fitting into sub$-100 price category.

To return to the desktop graphics market, Trident is planning to offer a desktop version of its Blade XP4 chip announced as a notebook solution this April. As you know, Blade XP4, just like STM solutions, is based on tile architecture and features 4 rendering pipelines with 2 TMUs each. Trident chip supports AGP 4x and fully hardware compliant with DirectX 8.1. Judging by these data we can say that Blade XP4 may appear pretty demanded in the budget 3D graphics accelerators market.

The new Trident chip will be manufactured in three different versions. The most powerful one, T3 will work at 300MHz and support DDR memory working at 700MHz. The second one, T2, will work at 250MHz chip and 500MHz memory frequencies. The last one, T1, will be none other but the same T2 with the memory bus cut down to 64bit.

The killer GeForce4 MX, RADEON 9000, SiS Xabre and S3 Savage XP from Trident has been assigned to UMC. Blade XP4 with about 30 millions of transistors will be manufactured with 0.13micron technology. The newcomer will cost between $31-$40 depending on the features set.