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A few years ago, the announcement of a more powerful processor by one of the market's major players would have sent shivers through the crowded graphics melee.

But Trident Microsytems' Le Nguyen welcomed the entry of ATI Inc. Nguyen, marketing manager for Trident, especially welcomed the launch of the ATI Radeon 9700 graphics card solution that went to market at the suggested retail price of $399.

Trident's latest processor comes to market in a card solution at a suggested retail price of $99, Nguyen said. The Trident XP4T3 marks the company's re-entry into the desktop graphics market in a big way, and Nguyen thinks it will make a difference.

"The ATI solution uses brute force," Nguyen said. "The key here is the methodology behind the pixel shading [of the XP4]. We use an optimized algorithm that is based on advanced math. What we offer is similar graphics performance at half the transistor count."

Comparing the Radeon 9700 with a Trident processor is like comparing a Porsche with a Volkswagen, said Jon Peddie of JonPeddie Research. "It's not a fair comparison."

While Trident says its XP4 T3 can match 80 percent of the performance of the Radeon 9700, Peddie says the more likely comparison is Nvidia's current top-of-the-line GeForce4 GPU, which produces 80 percent of the performance of the new Radeon.

What Trident lacks in performance, it makes up for in marketing and low prices. At $100 or less, it seems the XP4 card might be a compelling solution. ATI will also have a card priced in the $150 range, but it will only have a 64-bit frame buffer, versus Trident's 128-bit frame buffer, Nguyen said. In addition, Trident will also offer value alternatives to its performance card at $70 and below, Nguyen said.

While Trident's claims may be unverifiable for the moment, the company's gumption is admirable. Of course in the graphics market, the company has nowhere to go but up, after having nowhere to go but down a few years ago.

Back then, the graphics space was extremely crowded with somewhere in the neighborhood of 30 companies competing for a finite space. Seeing an oversupplied market, Trident retreated to producing graphics for the mobile market, and it was able to eke out a meager sliver there along with a graphics company called S3. The mobile market is basically controlled by ATI, Peddie said, and Nvidia is actually the upstart there.

Yet Trident offers some value points despite trailing in true performance. Beyond the price-points, Trident's XP4 GPUs are manufactured on United Microelectronics Corp.'s 0.13-micron process, and the chip is sampling now to Trident's customers, Nguyen said. That's an advantage of cost and power dissipation compared to the Radeon 9700, which is built on 0.15-micron technology.

The XP4 chip is just one-third the size of Nvidia's GeForce4 4600 with just 30 million transistors. There has been an ongoing war in transistor count between ATI and Nvidia. ATI's latest Radeon products built on 0.15 micron consist of 107 million transistors.

Trident is offering a cooler-running alternative to ATI's GPU, but it's unclear whether power or heat is a major concern in the desktop space. Still, Trident makes a point. ATI's solution requires its own cooling fan, and Trident's XP4 requires only a heat sink. That makes ATI's card less reliable, Nguyen said. If the fan goes bad on a Radeon card, the consumer is out $400, he said.

Nguyen says Trident's solution will be ready for the holiday buying season and hinted that Nvidia's next-generation GeForce GPU won't emerge until November, which is too late for the holiday system build. Nvidia won't comment on the launch date of its next-generation processor, but the company doesn't seem to be too concerned about the timing of its release. In fact, at a recent chipset launch, Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang hinted that the next-generation GeForce would offer performance so compelling that it would redefine the market.

Regardless, Trident is counting on Nvidia to be distracted. Nguyen said Nvidia hasn't devoted its usual diligence to bring the next-generation GeForce to market.

Nvidia officials remain undaunted and say the company has never missed a crucial product introduction and doesn't expect to miss one in the near term.