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.

On to: First Impressions