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.
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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:
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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.
