by Anton Shilov
05/14/2003 | 01:28 PM
Last year analysts were quite impressed by Trident’s Blade XP4 graphics processors with DirectX 8.1 support and “70% of performance offered by competing solutions”. The chips were actually inexpensive since they only contained 30 million of transistors in contrast to 40 to 65 million of transistors utilised by GPUs from ATI or NVIDIA. But is Trident Blade XP4 is as good as the company claims it to be? Well, a reader points out that not really.
<%BANNER[article]%>Trident Blade XP4 unveiled nearly a year ago is DirectX 8.1 capable graphics processor with flexible architecture and tile-based rendering techniques. Depending on the version of the GPU, it features 250-300MHz core-clock, 64- or 128-bit memory controller and so on. It is made using 0.13 micron fabrication process at UMC. You can learn more about the chip here.
A reader sent us an e-mail claiming that there are cheats in the drivers of Trident Blade XP4 graphics solution in his Toshiba Tecra M1. According to his findings, the graphics systems scores lower results in 3DMark2001 when the name of executable file is changed from the original. For instance, his Toshiba Tecra M1 based on Intel Pentium-M 1.60GHz with 512MB of DDR SDRAM and Windows XP scores 5793 in 3DMark 2001 when the name of the its launch file is unchanged, but once the name is different, the score decreases to 2954. In contrast, the notebook with the same hardware, but ATI Mobility RADEON 9000 graphics scores 4890; though, the reader does not tell if he tried to rename the 3DMark with ATI hardware or not.
Le Nguyen, Graphics Marketing VP of Trident Microsystems said that his company implements proprietary software and hardware support to accelerate special 3D graphics features that could become the performance bottlenecks in various 3D graphics applications. In order to selectively enable this performance acceleration, their driver is designed to recognize the names of these popular applications of interest. Therefore when you change the names of the applications of interest, the optimizations will not be enabled and the performance is reduced as the result. According to Mr. Nguyen, this is not cheating in the driver, but is selective performance optimization of popular applications of interest by using an unique combination of software + hardware algorithm proprietary to Trident.
Software performance optimisations are great, however, at this time it seems that they degrade image quality. Take a look on two screenshots from 3DMark 2001. The left picture is taken with performance optimisations, while the right picture without them (when the 3DMark executable is renamed). The difference is very clear.
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Looks like it becomes trendy to change quality for speed, as we know SiS does the same with its Xabre GPUs (see the details in our review).
PS. X-bit labs unfortunately had no opportunity to test Trident Blade XP4, so, we were not able to carry out some experiments with this solutions ourselves.