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ATI Radeon VE
By Kelly Lu - July 23, 2001
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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.
 On to: The Technology
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