Prices And Competitors
ATi plays its first ace at the beginning of the game - with the price. The suggested price of $85 makes the Radeon VE Dual Display Edition the uncontested price champion. In comparison, the Asus AGP-V7100 2V1D dual monitor card with the GeForce2-MX chip costs $9 more, while the Matrox Millennium G450 Dualhead is even more expensive at $14.
| Product | Dual Monitor Support | Memory | Price |
|---|---|---|---|
| ATi Radeon VE | yes, Hydravision | 32 MB DDR SDRAM | $85 |
| Asus AGP-V7100 2V1D | yes, Twinview | 32 MB SDRAM | $94 |
| Matrox Millennium G450 | yes, Dualhead | 32 MB DDR SDRAM | $99 |
3D game performance is less important for the targeted user group. The range of functions for 2D performance is much more significant. Granted, occasional gamers should not be left out of the equation. For that reason, we also present the game performance of all three test candidates later in the article. First, however, we'll examine the list of features:
| Feature | Radeon VE DDR | Geforce2 MX | Millennium G450 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Dual Monitor Support | yes | yes | yes |
| Name of Dual Monitor Support | Hydravision | Twinview | Dualhead |
| Rendering Pipelines | 1 | 2 | 1 |
| Textures per Pipeline | 3 | 2 | 2 |
| Chip clock | 183 MHz | 175 MHz | 125 MHz |
| Memory clock | 183 MHz | 166 MHz | 166 MHz |
| Memory type | DDR | SDR | DDR |
| Max. memory bandwidth | 3.4 GByte/s | 2.9 GByte/s | 2.7 GByte/s |
| Max. polygon rate | 15 MPolys/s | 20 MPolys/s | 5 MPolys/s |
| Max. Texel fillrate | 550 MTexels/s | 733 MTexels/s | 250 MTexels/s |
| first RAMDAC | 300 MHz | 350 MHz | 360 MHz |
| second RAMDAC | integrated | external | integrated |
| TMDS for digital screen (DVI) | integrated | external | integrated |
| Multiple desktops | yes | no | yes |
| Texture compression | yes | yes | no |
| Motion Compensation (DVD/MPEG) | yes | yes | yes |
| IDCT (DVD/MPEG) | yes | no | no |
Even a quick-and-dirty evaluation of this table allows for some preliminary conclusions: Despite the outstanding 3D basic data for the GeForce2 MX - polygon rate and fill rate - its range of functions when operating two monitors is less convincing. Neither multiple desktops nor adjustments of the application windows settings are possible with the GeForce2 MX Twinview. On the other hand, the Millennium G450 Dualhead has all of these functions. Another positive aspect of the Radeon VE is that it can handle all of the features that are important when displaying MPEG2/DVD videos.
