VOGONS

Trident 3D image 9850, PCI model? ... and discussion of alternate pre-2000 PCI 3D

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First post, by BitWrangler

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Hi Vogons,

The Trident 3DImage line has recently become of interest to me, due to learning that they have a triangle setup engine. Now like many 3D parts of the late 90s, they might have been a year behind when they would have been top class. These for example might have provided performance equivalent to software rendering on a PII-266 ... trouble is, ppl who were buying, were looking for something to make their machine faster at 3D, not be the same as putting a 2D card in it, because they were already buying a CPU that fast.

So I am thinking along the lines of "What if?" you had a slower machine, PCI only, and wanted to double it's speed at 3D, buying a card you hoped you could buy maybe a year earlier, but came out too late.

Thus I come to look at the 3DImage, the 9750 being the founder model, and available in PCI, but of course I wonder about the improved/fixed 9850... I am seeing absence of PCIs "around" and no mentions, but also I found a PCI device table where a device ID was allocated for a 9850 PCI... so wondering if there WAS one manufacturer who trotted one out, they just being obscure rather than non-existent.

Also I notice the SiS6326 has full triangle setup and may bear investigation. Again it's a case of it coming on the market at the time where it's acceleration was outpaced by the fastest CPUs, so gaining a "decelerator" moniker like others, but if it "does nothing" for a 300Mhz CPU, that doesn't mean it does nothing for a much slower CPU, providing drivers are not too heavy.

Heaviness of drivers is why I think I won't be thinking about RagePro/XL as they were demanding PII as minimum spec at launch. So seem like they are CPU demanding, more so than others... even though they are supposed to also have full triangle setup.

So anyway, don't know whether to "camp" for sale listings in case a 9850 PCI eventually shows or whether to settle for a 9750 earlier... or switch attentions to another card... hard to find CPU scaling info for old cards, and even find your way through the BS to what cards actually unload from the CPU and whether other features that are shovelwared into the driver will negate all unloading by giving the CPU too much else to do instead.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

Reply 1 of 1, by BitWrangler

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Gah, finally dug a 9750 review out of Anandtech and they reviewed it as a 2D card.

In some of their other roundups though, was curious to see the Rendition Verite cards doing a mid teens fps on quake whether they were on a 166mhz cyrix or a PII-400, that made them inside 20% of top performance on the cyrix but just about bottom on the PII ... with 20% down, vs 80% down. The question then, much as it is now, is whether it was worth 4x the price for 20% better on a low end CPU. The point about another card going gangbusters on a faster CPU and getting 5x performance for 4x the price, is invalid when you're not going to upgrade.

In case you didn't infer it, from the alternate in title, I was intending to avoid discussion of Voodoo cards in here, because they seem to be the fastest even on very limited CPU. I had thought the V2 needed 200mhz to get going, but no, it's still fastest card a few dozen mhz below that. Anyway, unlikely to deploy my limited voodoo selection in very low end, will give them better seats, buying cards for the purpose is kind of out of the question at current prices.

Early Savage performance in interesting too... seeing things where they seemed to love systems in the 200-400mhz area, but fall behind a lot with more CPU... in particular they had somewhat amazing D3D grunt, like 33% higher than competitors, while being 10-25% down at various openGL titles. That was on early drivers too, but they needed some configuration finesse apparently. Also 640 and 800 resolutions 16 or 32 bit seem to be same framerates, while 1024 res drops off a bit. Need to see some figures on PCI/low CPU on those.

The particular difficulty is that cards were released past when reviewers thought a P166 would be relevant to anyone, so never tested lower than a celly 300 or so, then results up in the mid hundreds are really drawing scores high and far apart... you can see where cards reach their limits of upward scaling but hard to tell what they're gonna do lower.

Unicorn herding operations are proceeding, but all the totes of hens teeth and barrels of rocking horse poop give them plenty of hiding spots.

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