Video Cards in 2001: Preview

ATI: Building up Momentum

After coming out of the blue with an extremely well rounded Radeon part, ATI has all of the sudden been tossed back into the game and is currently in a position where it can go head to head with the market giant, NVIDIA. 

As we alluded to in our analysis of 3dfx’s Voodoo5 6000 cancellation, ATI will not be making a Radeon MAXX (dual Radeon board).  The main reason behind this being that the Radeon MAXX would end up being in the same price range as the GeForce2 Ultra and what the Voodoo5 6000 would have been as well. 

This however, doesn’t mean that we will not see any future MAXX products from ATI.  ATI told us that they are working on increasing the efficiency of their MAXX technology and we should expect to see it resurface in the future, however the Radeon, as it stands now, will not be paired up with another chip and released as a MAXX product. 

ATI just recently announced their Radeon Value Edition (Radeon VE for short) which is directed at the same market as the GeForce2 MX and Matrox’s G450.

The Radeon VE differs from the regular Radeon in that it only has a single pixel pipeline versus the two pixel pipelines on the regular Radeon.  This cuts the effective fill rate of the Radeon in half for the VE, and with the core operating at 183MHz we can expect a theoretical maximum fill rate of 550 MTexels/s which gives it a slight fill rate advantage over the GeForce2 MX (480 MTexels/s). 

Since the Radeon design requires that the core and memory clocks be run synchronously, the Radeon VE will also ship with 183MHz memory.  In order to keep the size of the Radeon VE chip down, thus reducing cost, ATI will be using a 64-bit DDR memory bus, which is equivalent to the 128-bit SDR bus of the Radeon SDR. 

So the Radeon VE is doomed from the start to never have a higher level of performance than the Radeon SDR because they have the exact same amount of memory bandwidth.  However, once you take into account that that the Radeon VE has almost half the fill rate of the Radeon SDR you can realize how the Radeon VE can be slower than even the Radeon SDR. 

If you recall back to our Radeon SDR review you’ll remember that it is approximately the same speed as the GeForce2 MX, a bit slower at the lower resolutions and faster at higher resolutions.  With the Radeon VE having a lower fill rate than the Radeon SDR, you can expect the Radeon VE to perform around 10% slower than a GeForce2 MX. 

This is obviously not the most attractive performance point for ATI, however they are attempting to offer performance close to that of the GeForce2 MX while undercutting NVIDIA in terms of the price.  The Radeon VE will have a selling price of $129.99 which places it under the price of a GeForce2 MX with TwinView support.  Why would ATI compare the Radeon VE to the GeForce2 MX with TwinView? 

The Radeon VE will be ATI’s first graphics product to offer their dual output technology, similar to Matrox’s DualHead and NVIDIA’s TwinView, which they like to call HydraVision.  The HydraVision name comes from the software behind their dual monitor output technology which they are very confident in.  Offering many of the same features as Matrox’s DualHead and NVIDIA’s TwinView, HydraVision on a sub-$130 Radeon VE should make it quite competitive with both of those solutions, even if it’s 10% slower than the GeForce2 MX. 

If it were to be available in stores today, the Radeon VE could potentially offer the GeForce2 MX some serious competition, unfortunately we won’t see it in stores until February 2001.  By that time, a $129.99 price tag won’t be very impressive at all.  For performance enthusiasts you’ll be able to pick up a GeForce2 GTS for a little more than that, and if there’s a need for dual monitor support, the GeForce2 MX will probably be available for the same price if not less.