By Andrew Worobyew

This chip is presented by HIS Trident Blade XP 32 MBytes, AGP videocard.

Features:

• Trident Blade XP chip, 166 MHz clock rate, 128-bit engine;
• 32 MBytes SDRAM memory in 4 Winbond 6ns microchips, 166 MHz clock rate;
• Peak fill rate in the multitexturing mode is 333 megapixels/sec and 333 megatexels/sec.

Overclocking is impossible.

The oldest Trident company after many unsuccessful tries has entered the market with a competitive 3D-accelerator solution that may become an opponent of NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200. I.e. 3D perfomance of Blade XP is on the level of NVIDIA Riva TNT2Pro. Of course, Trident isn't aimed at pressing anybody from the 3D-accelerator market. New cards are designed for business sector of computer market. Well, and of course for playing good 3D games. The most attractive feature of a new card is it's price, that's less than the price of NVIDIA GeForce2 MX200 cards. But now Blade XP are almost out of demand, so it's our last review of this card.

For the 15th of February 2002 the only drivers version from Trident is 1.22.78. There are no comparatives as it's the only version available.

Bad news: the software is so incompleted that there are many problems with this card.

First of all, there's no 32-bit color in Serious Sam (strange, but Quake3 doesn't have this problem). Then there are lock-ups in Giants on Pentium4 and Athlon platforms. And 3DMark2001 also crashes on KT133A platform.

There are quality problems as well. E.g. 3DMark2001 (Game2) shows this:

And below you can look at Comanche4 quality and compare screenshots taken on this card with reference ones taken on NVIDIA GeForce3.

Games / Cards	1	2	3	4	5	6
Trident Blade XP
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	7	8	9	10	11	12
Trident Blade XP
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	13	14	15	16	17	18
Trident Blade XP						-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	19	20	21	22	23	24
Trident Blade XP	-			-
NVIDIA GeForce3

Games / Cards	25	26	27	28
Trident Blade XP
NVIDIA GeForce3

Game list:

• 1. Return to Castle Wolfenstein
• 2. Unreal2 - for GeForce cards, Unreal - for all other
• 3. Comanche4
• 4. No One Lives Forever
• 5. Serious Sam
• 6. Colin McRAE Rally2
• 7. Red Faction
• 8. Rally Trophy
• 9. Sacrifice
• 10. Venom
• 11. Need For Speed V (Porshe 2000)
• 12. Real MYST
• 13. Blade of Darkness
• 14. Giants
• 15. 3DMark2001: Game1
• 16. 3DMark2001: Game2
• 17. 3DMark2001: Game3
• 18. 3DMark2001: Game4
• 19. 3DMark2001: Dot3
• 20. 3DMark2001: EMBM
• 21. 3DMark2001: Vertex Shaders
• 22. 3DMark2001: Pixel Shaders
• 23. Black & White
• 24. Undying
• 25. Anachronox
• 26. Max Payne
• 27. AquaNox
• 28. Serious Sam II

2D quality is poor, on the level of S3 Savage4. Clear pictures may be obtained up to 1024x768x100 Hz only. But there are no problems with the speed of 2D.

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