The VLB and early PCI models were decent 2D pixel pushers. I'm referring to the TGUI 9400 to 9680 or so models .

Good at... what?

If all you did was 2D office/productivity stuff, Trident cards were fine. 3D acceleration was never their strong point, though; that's probably what you're asking about.

ISA Tridents were generally very good in my experience - nice image quality / speed / compatibility / CGA mode. Great for a 386 games machine. VLB cards tho sucked, they few that I’ve tried anyway.

Sure, make a good door stop in a pinch, even used one once to hold part of a plastic bezel i was taking off a laptop cause i couldn't find a 2nd flat head

darry wrote:

The VLB and early PCI models were decent 2D pixel pushers. I'm referring to the TGUI 9400 to 9680 or so models .

I never had much problems playing 2D games and early 3D games with a Trident 9400 CXi VLB card. Its Windows 3.x drivers also supported GUI acceleration and a virtual desktop (and had a custom color scheme that was rather pleasant on the eyes). Unfortunately, that card seems to be rather rare these days...

badmojo wrote:

ISA Tridents were generally very good in my experience - nice image quality / speed / compatibility / CGA mode.

Some ISA Tridents are decent, others are notoriously bad, and seriously hamper performance in faster 386 and 486 machines.
Trident had a very bad reputation for poor performance, and being the go-to option for budget systems (its compatibility is mainly good because it was so widespread, and most software was tested against it).
The most common card is the 9000, where the 8900s generally perform better.

Trident 9440/9680 are fine 2D cards. Only downside is that you need UniVBE to enable LFB modes.

The only 3D accelerated Trident chip I ever saw was in a laptop (Cyber 9525) and it had only 2.5MB integrated RAM so it couldn't do much.

I grew up on Trident cards. Both our first PC (286) and second (486SX) were ISA based. The first had a 8900, iirc, and the second a 9000. I remember the latter having a slightly fuzzy picture.

For my 286 retro build I have tried both an 8900 and a 9000. Both cards still are a bit lacking in picture quality. E.g. in text modes i have a bit of wiggling along vertical lines. Also the output is a bit weak an washed out. I have to tweak the image settings in OBS considerably.

I now have an ET4000 in the 286 and it has much better picture quality, much brighter and colorful and without the vertical line issue. I am not sure if it is due to bad capacitors, cheap RAMDAC or something like that. The Trident cards do work fine, and I could definitely continue using them. But since now I can afford something better, I do so. I will hold on to the TVGAs for nostalgia and for testing out stuff.

The 9680 had - for its time - excellent TV-out that just resampled whatever you were doing on VGA to the PAL composite output.

I was never one to watch computer stuff on big screen TVs (instead I had a huge 24" widescreen CRT monitor and used TV-in on the PC for that), but i had a niche application that needed TV-out: I had disassembled a 1970s vintage video camera, which had a 3" mono CRT as viewfinder. At the time all kinds of LED and LCD status indicators for 5.25" slots were all the rage, so both to poke fun at that and beat them at their own game, I mounted the 3" CRT in two 5.25" slots in my ATX bigtower and tried to put some info there. It took a composite feed, with three wires (+12V, composite video and GND), so hooked two up to a molex and jury-rigged a cinch IEC connector to the composite and GND lines. TLDR: it worked. But getting my Windows XP desktop sensibly extended there without screwing up my main display (1600x900@85Hz on that 24" CRT) proved a challenge. I can't remember exactly what main VGA I was running at the time - probably either a Matrox G450 or some or other GeForce MX - but I just couldn't get the TV-out to do what I wanted.

Then I stuck that 9680 in the system and it just worked. Nothing fancy, just 2D - but as nicely rendered as possible on an even then >25-year old 3" mini display, and not impacting my main display at all. So not sexy, but very useful in a specific niche.

TVGA9000 - good for everything from XT (8-bit compatible) up to 386SX
TGUI9400/9420 - decent card for VLB, on par with S3 805i
TGUI9440 - decent PCI card on par with ATI Mach64, good for fast 486/5x86 and slower Pentiums

Compared to Oak video cards, I think all Trident cards are probably good. 🙄

^Though, some of the earlier 16-bit ISA Oaks could be switched to 8-bit mode. I assume they'd be good for testing MBs if not anything else...

I'm pretty surprised that nobody in this thread has mentioned the 8900D. Although I don't own one, they are supposed to be very fast DOS cards.

Blade3D runs some Direct3D 3-6 games quite well. Sort of a Savage3D / G200 / Vanta / Banshee level thing. Quite an improvement over the older 3DImage chips. It also has DVD acceleration unlike some of its peers. It was used in notebooks in various forms, and as an IGP for VIA MVP4.

SW-SSG wrote:

^Though, some of the earlier 16-bit ISA Oaks could be switched to 8-bit mode. I assume they'd be good for testing MBs if not anything else...

Yep, I have an OAK OTIVGA that has CGA\EGA and VGA ports and can be used in 8bit or 16bit mode. I used it to run my IBM 5150 (only 8bit ISA slots, 4.77Mhz 8088) on a VGA monitor and it worked great. It also worked when connecting to a CGA monitor.

I'm sure its slow as dirt, but you can bet I'm going to hang onto that card for those reasons.

I remember Trident being the brunt of many jokes among my geek friends and relatives back in the late 90s to early 2000s. In light of all the data collected in recent years about DOS compatibility and performance however, its hard to find much fault with them any more, aside from a few outlying models with poor 2D speed.

I have never tried using a Trident card for 3D gaming though. I recently came into possession of a few Blade3D cards though, so I'll probably give it a go at some point. I have a feeling it'll be like the S3 Savage cards (at best) in that the card has potential but the software support ruins it.

I use a Trident 8900C in my 286, suits my needs fine. I've also used it in my XT in the past too, before I replaced it with a CGA card.

I've had this card for at least 20 years, originally installed in a 386DX build that was later upgraded to a Socket 7 Pentium. Due to lack of funds at the time, it was retained briefly as the main graphics card in that Pentium PC, running Windows 98 in 256 colours in 1999. 🤣

Not a bad card for DOS, but wouldn't want to live with that for Windows usage.

TGUI9440 - decent PCI card on par with ATI Mach64, good for fast 486/5x86 and slower Pentiums

They are painfully slow in high color.

I can possibly run a quick DOS based benchmark with a TVGA 8900, 9000 and a Tseng ET4000. I did one quick check the other day and the ET4000 would push the absolute ISA limit (about 5 MiB/s), whereas the Tridents were stuck at 3 point something. So there is a definitive advantage in using an ET4000. I will report back when I have collected more accurate numbers. Any wishes for particular benchmarks I should run? (Keep in mind this must run on a 286 with DOS or Windows 3.1)

The Trident 8900 DC-R 1Mb DRAM has 32bit RAM and is fast like ET4000.
Except for one thing, it does not contain windows accelration.