This is a printable version of the article found at http://onepc.net/reviews/0040/ To print, press CTRL + P on your keyboard now.

By Kelly Lu (kellylu@onepc.net) - July 23, 2001

Infobox

What? Radeon VE Product Page Who? ATI Technologies Inc. Home Page How much? $129 USD (SRP)

It's always amazing to see how fast the computer market can change. For example, the past few years, we've seen ATI, the Canadian graphics card maker, slip from being the world's largest supplier of consumer-level graphics accelerators to becoming a close second to NVIDIA. Last year, when it was still considered to be the largest of all graphics chip makers, ATI released their Radeon DDR video card in an effort to try to slow down NVIDIA from gaining the right to be the biggest of them all with their GeForce2 GTS.

With performance almost matching, and sometimes even beating, the NVIDIA chipset, the ATI Radeon DDR was a top performer; however, it wasn't met with much success in its goal to slow down NVIDIA, probably because of the fact that ATI had never grown a reputation for top 3D performance while NVIDIA, with their TNT2 and GeForce256 chipsets, had just the opposite and was known throughout the enthusiasts' and gamers' community for having top-performing products.

Now, NVIDIA has covered all aspects of the consumer graphics market with their GeForce2 line of products; ATI has only managed to produce direct competition to the GeForce2 GTS and MX line of products with their Radeon DDR and SDR chips, respectively. Each version of the Radeon produces performance levels similar to that of the NVIDIA equivalent; the Radeon DDR performs similar to the GeForce2 GTS and the Radeon SDR performs similar to the GeForce2 MX. There is, however, one feature in NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX line of mainstream-level chipsets that ATI's Radeon SDR lacks: native dual-display support.

With the Radeon VE, it is clear that ATI's intention is to try to steal support for dual-display on a single chip for the consumer from NVIDIA. Today, we look at the ATI Radeon VE and will compare it directly to NVIDIA's GeForce2 MX line of products in terms of performance, features and quality.

At the center of the Radeon VE graphics card is, of course, the Radeon VE chipset. The Radeon VE is much like what the GeForce2 MX is to the GeForce2 GTS: a crippled version of the Radeon core with added support for dual-display on a single chip.

Some of the similarities of the Radeon VE include the fact that it is built on the same .18 micron process that the Radeon is built on. It is also clocked at 183MHz just like all the other versions of the Radeon family and, because of the 1:1 ratio between the core and memory in all Radeon cores, the memory is also clocked at 183MHz.

Just a note about the memory: the memory that is included with our Radeon VE is 32MB of DDR memory. This DDR memory, however, is only on a 64-bit wide bus, so, basically its performance will be similar, if not identical to SDR memory on a 128-bit bus, which is what most GeForce2 MX cards are using. This is the first difference that the Radeon VE has when compared to the Radeon DDR and SDR, which has a 128-bit memory bus.

The Radeon VE also, like the rest of the Radeon family of cores, supports the same 3 types of bump mapping: emboss, dot product 3 and environment bump mapping; the GeForce2 line only supports emboss, along with per-pixel bump mapping. Also inside the Radeon VE is ATI's Hyper-Z technology, which is supposed to help to lower the memory bandwidth needed for rendering a 3D scene. Finally, the Radeon VE also supports IDCT, which ATI has been the only one to use for quite some time, and helps to relieve a lot of the CPU processing power needed when playing DVD's or decoding Digital TV feeds.

Beyond this point, the Radeon VE is very much different from its bigger brother, the Radeon DDR. First of all, the Radeon DDR has 2 rendering pipelines, each capable of handling 3 texels (a pixel of a texture) per pixel; the Radeon VE only has one. This effectively cuts the fill-rate in half to 550 MTexels/second compared to the Radeon DDR's 1100 MTexels/second.

Secondly, the Radeon VE only has a 300MHz RAMDAC, compared to the 360MHz RAMDAC that the rest of the Radeon family (not counting LE) uses. We will just have to see if this will impact the overall 2D image quality of the Radeon VE during our tests.

Finally, the third and most notable and disappointing (at least for me) feature missing from the Radeon VE is the fact that ATI decided to drop the Charisma engine, their hardware transform and lighting engine, from its core. It's such a shame since hardware T&L was just beginning to become accepted in the industry with games such as MDK2 and Operation: Flashpoint having native support for hardware T&L. Plus, this ruin's users from getting at least half-decent scores in 3DMark 2000/2001.

Upon first inspection of the Radeon VE board, it seems that something is missing. If you guessed a fan, you're right! I haven't seen a video card come without a fan ever since I first used a TNT2 video card, so this actually came at quite a surprise to me. Running without a fan will make the video card run noise-less, which is a bonus in itself.

Note: After running the Radeon VE on seemingly endless loops of Quake III: Arena, the fan-less heatsink only got slightly hot, which is very impressive.

The back of the video card has a regular D-Sub VGA connector, an S-Video connector and a DVI-I connector. The contents of the box were stuffed with cables and adapters; everything you need to plug the Radeon VE to any TV or monitor (of course, not modified ones). ATI includes an S-Video cable for the TV-OUT feature of the Radeon VE, a D-Sub to DVI-I adapter (which can be used with other DV-I cards) to plug a regular analog monitor into the DVI-I jack and also a S-Video to Composite Video adapter, for connecting to TV's without the need for S-Video.

There was no full manual, however: only a manual that can be categorized as a quick-start guide. This is fine for users who have experience with installing a video card, but doesn't provide enough information for first-timers.

Installation was a snap. The installation process installed a slew of new programs, such as a DVD player and ATI's own media player, and features onto the computer.

First of all, the ATI drivers provide a way for the user to change color, OpenGL and Direct3D options as well as giving the user a way of managing the display combinations. The drivers support 2 and 4 sample anti-aliasing for both OpenGL and Direct3D and can be enabled or disabled through the drivers easily. They also allow the user to use different resolutions and refresh rates for each of the individual displays attached to the Radeon VE.

Unlike NVIDIA and their self-developed TwinView technology, the Radeon VE includes Appian Graphics' HydraVision software on top of the basic dual-display support that the drivers provide. The dual-display feature will still work perfectly without the HydraVision software, but HydraVision adds some interesting features to managing dual-displays.

One of its features is it ability to create multiple virtual desktops. This allows users to, for example, create different virtual desktops for different tasks. A user can, for example, create a gaming virtual desktop, with shortcuts to their games on it for quick access and then switch over to a "work" virtual desktop, where their word processor and email client can be left open all the time ready to be used. It also remembers "bars" that some programs might install, like the Microsoft Office Shortcut bar, so one can also add the Microsoft Office Shortcut bar to their "work" desktop, but keep it away from the gaming desktop.

Other features include the ability to set up hot-keys so that you can quickly move a window into whichever monitor you choose and the ability to have HydraVision memorize which monitor each of your programs will open in, among a few others. Finally, and this is probably the only feature that I find to be useful for my personal use, a button on each window open will allow the user to maximize the application to the full size of both displays.

Although HydraVision provides some neat features, I would, personally, prefer to just keep HydraVision off of my system, since I have no use for its many features and can save the extra space on my taskbar for other things-but others might disagree. I must state again that the multi-display feature of the Radeon VE will work fine with just the ATI drivers installed and without HydraVision.

I would also like to point out that the Radeon VE supports a TON of different display combinations-far more than I've ever seen; from just two CRT's to a combination of a CRT and a TV to a digital flat panel and a TV. Of course, you can use only one CRT, digital flat panel or TV without a problem either. You can even use all three connectors at the back of the video card… it's just that the software will only support the extending of your desktop to 2 of them, and the third will just be a mirror of one of them.

While we're on the topic of dual-monitors, I would like to share with you my experiences with ATI's dual-display solution with the following pictures, both showing "mirroring," which is the default setting if one does not choose to extend their desktop across two displays (just in case you didn't recognize from the pictures, both monitors are 17" and 18" TFT LCD screens from Samsung and KDS, respectively--reviews to be posted soon--and the thing in the middle is the MiSEL MP3 player):

2D Image Quality
As I mentioned before, the Radeon VE has only a 300MHz RAMDAC, compared to a 360MHz RAMDAC that's included in the rest of the Radeon family. Thus, it is only appropriate that I brief you on the 2D image quality.

On the primary monitor, the Radeon VE provides a very crisp and clear image at even the highest resolutions, but on the secondary monitor, the image quality is very poor. At a resolution of 1280x1024, which is what my monitor's recommended resolution is, the Radeon VE gave out one of the poorest images that I've seen ever from its secondary monitor connector (the DVI-I port). I'm no sure if this is caused by the included DVI-I to VGA adapter or by the DVI-I port itself since I didn't have a DVI-I monitor handy, but the two of them combined provided some very blurry images, evident on almost all resolutions.

DVD Quality
The Radeon VE's DVD playback quality was top-notch. Although little details are very hard to pick out when watching a movie, especially during the heat of the action, I can tell you that, as a whole, the Radeon VE outputted one of the best DVD images around. Plus, ATI's IDTC implementation will mean that it will help to ease the amount of CPU power that decoding DVD's using software will take up.

All tests were run on a clean installation of Windows ME with all drivers installed. No other programs were left running in the background while tests were running, no screen savers or power saving features were configured and the mouse was left still for the entire duration of the benchmark. Each test was run three times, and the average of the three scores are shown within the results shown here.

Driver Settings
Usually, I do not go over which driver settings I used when running benchmarks, but in this case, I should go over which settings I had to change for the Radeon VE's drivers in order to obtain fair results.

First of all, I ran OpenGL tests with the "Performance" setting checked. I had to, however, uncheck the box (or circle) that says "Convert 32-bit Textures to 16-bit," which would basically force the Radeon VE to run with 16-bit textures even if the game settings says 32-bit.

The second setting that I had to modify is the one in the Direct3D tab. As you can see from the screenshot below, the setting says 16;24, which means that the depth of the Z-Buffer, a portion of the graphics system that is used to store the depth of each pixel in the scene, will only run at a maximum depth of 24-bits. The proper setting, and fair setting, would be to change it to 16;24;32, which would allow a Z-Buffer depth of 32-bits.

First up, we have the "tried, tested and true" Quake III: Arena. We have used this benchmark over and over again here at OnePC.NET's test labs, and time and time again, it has given us a very clear image of the performance capabilities of the product at hand.

Upon first inspection, one might be very surprised at the results. While the GeForce2 MX400 has a clear lead over the rest of the cards, the more-than-2-year old TNT2 Pro managed to score a higher mark than the Radeon VE at 640x480 and 16-bit! We do, however, notice that the Radeon VE has a teeny tiny difference between the 16-bit and 32-bit marks.

Here, we see that the Radeon VE scores higher than the much-older TNT2 Pro--whew! Unfortunately, though, it's 16-bit scores are still closer to the TNT2's than the GeForce2 MX400's, while its 32-bit score again shows where the Radeon VE's strength lies.

Again, the same story here. The GeForce2 MX400 continues to take a commanding lead over all other cards, while the Radeon VE maintains a very little difference between 16-bit and 32-bit color-depths.

At the highest setting, both the Radeon VE and TNT2 Pro dip below the "playable" 30-FPS mark; however, where we see that both the NVIDIA cards obtain a HUGE performance loss with 32-bit color-depth, the difference, when it comes to the Radeon VE, is still negligable.

Originally debuting in our PowerColor Evil Kyro review, the resolution scaling graph you see below is a very effective way of showing how a graphics card scales between resolutions and also how it handles 16-bit and 32-bit color-depth settings.

Ah, our observation before that the Radeon VE is able to maintain frame rates in 32-bit mode compared to 16-bit is once again confirmed here. We can see that the Radeon VE barely drops in performance, while both NVIDIA cards see a huge performance drop when running in 32-bit.

Serious Sam is a relatively new game and is, in my mind, one of the best games around now. Its single player missions are very interesting and challenging to play through, and it's "co-operative" multiplaying mode provides one of the most addicting multiplayer experiences around.

It's stunning graphics and special effects also makes this game an ideal benchmark for video cards. After running a few preliminary tests, I found that running the game using the "Quality" graphics setting provides the best ability to scale resolutions. Below are one of the few benchmarks published on the web utilizing Serious Sam and, you'll be sure that we'll be using more and more of this benchmark in the future.

The results from running Serious Sam under 640x480 resolution shocked me as much as it might shock you. Although not this apparent with the Quake III: Arena results seen before, the Radeon VE actually lagged behind both the GeForce2 MX400 and also the nearly-3-year-old TNT2 Pro. Even the Radeon VE's superior 32-bit performance that we saw throughout this review couldn't help it out. Now I see why ATI has not marketed this card as a gaming card like most of the other products in the Radeon family, but as a dual-monitor solution only...

At 800x600, the results are a tad bit less uglier for the Radeon VE since the much older TNT2 Pro only has an ever so small lead on the Radeon VE at both 16-bit and 32-bit resolutions. Unfortunately, the fact remains that the couple-month-old Radeon VE is being beaten by a couple-year-old video card. We should expect the Radeon VE to pull ahead of the TNT2 Pro at a higher resolution now...

...and pull ahead it shall! These results are at least becoming favourable to the Radeon VE, but they're still not pretty. The Radeon VE pulls ahead of the TNT2 Pro in 32-bit (by 0.1-FPS), but still lags behind in the 16-bit department.

Finally, we see that the Radeon VE pulls ahead of the TNT2 Pro in all areas--of course, the fact that the TN2 Pro was unable to finish this test could have been a factor. The GeForce2 MX400 continues to have a commanding lead; however, it drops below the 30-FPS threshold itself.

The benchmarks speak for themselves: the ATI Radeon VE was not designed to be a gaming video card. Throughout our tests, the Radeon VE was trading places with the TNT2 Pro, a nearly-3-year-old graphics chipset, and not its intended competition, the GeForce2 MX, which was ahead of both of the former cards. It's a little sad to see a Radeon core, after being built into such a powerful card as the Radeon DDR, being crippled to an extent that it is only able to compete with a 3-year old product.

Nevertheless, the Radeon VE does have something that the TNT2 Pro does not: a built-in dual-display capability. Unfortunately, its 2D image quality was very poor on the second connector, which potentially makes this feature more annoying than useful. Fortunately, ATI does include extra multiple-monitor management software in the form of Appian Graphics' HydraVision, which, depending on the user, could be of absolutely no use or be of very much use. This extra software is not found on most GeForce2 MX solutions and can be of extra value if the user feels that they need it.

At $129 USD, the Radeon VE is not a card that I would recommend, especially if the purpose is for mainly gaming; however, due to its relatively crisp and clear image quality on the primary display and excellent DVD playback support, the Radeon VE would be a good product for casual users who watches a lot of DVD's (on their computer monitor or on the TV, with the built-in Video-OUT connector) and would like use the dual-display feature only once in a while. The Radeon VE would also be good for casual gamers; even then, I would recommend a GeForce2 MX/200/400 solution over the Radeon VE.

Pros Dual-Display feature Included AG HydraVision not found on most GeForce2 MX solutions; can be of extra value to some users VGA D-Sub connector, DVI-I connector and TV-OUT connector; greatest number of supported display combinations that I've ever seen. Best solution for playing DVD's Cons 3D performance is poor. (-1.0) 2D image quality on second display connector is very poor. (-1.5)

Copyright © 2000-2001, OnePC Network Inc. All rights reserved.
OnePC.NET is found online at http://www.onepc.net