Trident's XP4 Benchmark Preview

We're still about two weeks away from receiving hardware from Trident for review but we were able to schedule an impromptu meeting with them when they came to Raleigh. The drivers are still far away from being ready so the performance is understandably not up to par with what Trident's expectations are, but they are still on track to achieving their performance goals.

Trident had a Pentium 4 2.53GHz system running on Intel's 845G motherboard with their reference T2 board. The system had both Windows 98SE and Windows XP installed, the reason being that the XP drivers were not as stable as the 98SE drivers at this point. Remember that the market for a sub-$100 graphics card is mostly running Windows 98 so it makes sense that Trident's 98SE drivers are further along than their XP drivers.

We only had time to run through a few Unreal Tournament 2003 tests before Trident had to run to catch their flight, but we were able to get some numbers out of the card; amazingly enough the card ran Unreal Tournament 2003 just fine with some relatively minor rendering issues. We could not get the card to run UT2003 under Windows XP at all so we were forced to use Windows 98SE for all of our tests.