ATI Radeon VE 32MB

Windows 2000 Driver Performance

For this section we will have to ask you to wait until tomorrow, where we will feature an article investigating driver performance of various cards in Windows98 as well as Windows 2000. We will investigate how the Radeon drivers perform in a variety of situations in Windows 2000 and also see how these drivers compare with their NVIDIA counterparts. Be sure to check back with us tomorrow.

Conclusion

The Radeon VE is not ATI's first stab at the budget video card market, the Radeon SDR gets that claim to fame. The Radeon VE does attack a new market, however, being the first to bring full featured dual monitor support to the Radeon product line. It is likely that this feature will be passed down to future Radeon products as time new ones come out. But, as of now, the Radeon VE is the only ATI product to offer the dual display feature. How does it fare in comparison to the other multi-monitor video cards out there, NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX and Matrox's G450?

Well, when it comes to performance, the GeForce2 MX wins hands down. The Radeon VE can not keep up with the MX's T&L engine and dual pipelines. Even though the Radeon VE is clocked slightly higher than the GeForce2 MX, it can not make up for its deficits.

In terms of dual monitor support, it seems that there may be some better options out there. The Radeon VE's HydraVision software is very solid and easy to use, but it may not be the best. We will find out in a few days when we release our full multi-monitor comparison.

The item holding the Radeon VE back is the thing that has been the achilles heal for the whole Radeon series. Although Appian's software is great, the ATI drivers still contain problems. When performing our tests for the review that will be going up detailing Windows 2000 performance, we ran into a multitude of problems that will be discussed soon..

The price of the Radeon VE is right. At $99 after a $20 mail in rebate, the card provides dual display capabilities at the lowest price out there. However, with the GeForce2 MX also costing around $100 and the Radeon SDR at $99, the Radeon VE has quite some competition, even with another ATI product. One has to wonder if now was the best time to introduce this card and if the extremely budget oriented Radeon VE was the product to do so on. For some the answer will be yes, as the low price of the Radeon VE provides excellent mult-monitor support for a powerful workstation. For many, however, the answer will be no. Many will prefer to wait for a higher performance multi-monitor solution from ATI, or perhaps to go with the GeForce2 MX so that their workstation can be a truly powerful gaming system as well.