Trident's XP4 Benchmark Preview

The Test System

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.

We setup an identical system at our labs in order to provide comparison benchmarks between the Trident XP4 T2 and its competitors:

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance Antalus - 800x600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB) ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Trident XP4 T2 (Beta) 121.0 81.5 71.0 | 0 | 24 | 48 | 73 | 97 | 121 | 145

Here the XP4 T2 delivers about 58% of the performance of a Ti 4200, definitely a bit shy of their target goal of 80% of the speed of a Ti 4600. The T2 is about 87% the speed of a Radeon 9000 Pro, which means that a T3 can probably offer performance greater than ATI's solution.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance Inferno - 800x600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB) ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Trident XP4 T2 (Beta) 105.3 72.9 64 | 0 | 21 | 42 | 63 | 84 | 105 | 126

The T2 continues to fall behind of the Ti 4200, this time around 60% of the performance of the entry-level GeForce4. The T2 continues to offer around 87% of the Radeon 9000 Pro.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance Asbestos - 800x600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB) Trident XP4 T2 (Beta) ATI Radeon 9000 Pro 182.7 154.0 149.3 | 0 | 37 | 73 | 110 | 146 | 183 | 219

The T2 comes closest to delivering Ti 4200 level performance under the Asbestos benchmark, which is more CPU bound than the other tests. The T2 delivers 83% of the Ti 4200 and actually outperforms the Radeon 9000 Pro.

Unreal Tournament 2003 Performance Suntemple - 800x600 NVIDIA GeForce4 Ti 4200 (64MB) ATI Radeon 9000 Pro Trident XP4 T2 (Beta) 146.6 117.7 93.0 | 0 | 29 | 59 | 88 | 117 | 147 | 176

Things return to normal in the Suntemple benchmark.