ATI Radeon VE Review - PAGE 1Nels Drugge - Tuesday, August 28th, 2001
Introduction
The world of the inexpensive and powerful dual display video card is here. The ability to make use of two monitors has been available for some time now, but has been generally difficult to setup and maintain. The need for this type of technology in a useable form for the general public has been growing quickly. The ATI Radeon VE is one of the answers to this problem.
The convenience of working on a large desktop spread of over two inexpensive monitors, cannot be underestimated. Whether you are a system administrator, multi-tasking between telnet sessions, research, and troubleshooting other projects, or a web designer/graphics artist working on multiple images, ftp and and e-mail, these products are indispensable. The ATI Radeon VE is a prime example of this move to inexpensive solutions for work place productivity.
Specs
GPU: Radeon VE graphics processor (.018 micron)
Core Speed: 183 Mhz
Core Memory Speed: 183 Mhz (266 Mhz)
RAM: 32 Megs DDR
AGP Mode: 2x/4x AGP
Others:
- HydraVision Multiple Monitor Management Software gives you flexible multi-display support to enable many combinations of VGA, DVI and TV
- DVD playback with integrated motion compensation and iDCT
- Analog video output support for both composite and S-Video
- HYPER Z technology
- PIXEL TAPESTRY architecture
- VIDEO IMMERSION technology
- Twin Cache Architecture
- True Color Rendering
- Triangle Setup Engine
- Texture Cache
- Bilinear/Trilinear Filtering
- Mip-Mapping
- Z-buffering and Double-buffering
- Emboss, Dot Product 3 and Environment bump mapping
- Spherical, Dual-Paraboloid and Cubic environment mapping
- Full Screen Anti-Aliasing (FSAA)
General
About 3 months ago I switched our production team from “old school” dual monitor systems (2 video cards, one VGA, one PCI), to one of the new dual monitor supported video cards. We haven’t looked back since
Administration and troubleshooting these machines has dropped dramatically and the software that is bundled with these cards allows more flexibility with the desktop environment. Performance has increased productivity across the board. An excellent investment at a very low cost. One of those few win-win situations.
ATI is one of the companies that are offering a dual monitor supported card in its Radeon VE. This card offers dual monitor support and a myriad of software tools that allow DVD playback, specifying separate resolutions per monitor, changing the placement of monitors, memory for where a program window opens, multiple desktops, etc, etc, etc…at a relatively low cost.
I would like to be clear on the actual use of this card. It is not a gaming card (as you will see with the benchmarks). It can be used as such, but certainly not at the same level as most if the high end video gaming cards out there. This is a card that is specifically designed for dual monitor support in a 2D environment and nothing else. If you are set on having dual monitors and want serious gaming performance then you will have go back to the “old school” setup that I mentioned earlier or to a more expensive. Now on with my impressions.
forums
send article 
hardware newsletter 
article comments (6) 
Lowest prices check
Digg this!
del.icio.us