Overall great video card, but may not exactly be a gamer's choice (ATI Radeon VE Dual Display Edition)

Member Name: Dr. Mengele

Product:	ATI Radeon VE Dual Display Edition
Date:	03/11/06 (236 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Multi-monitor, great TV-out image quality, great 3D image quality, comprehensive driver controls

Disadvantages: Rather poor 3D acceleration, some features slow the rendering down even if they're disabled

I have used this graphic card for a long time and what i can say from the very start is that it never failed to amaze me with the image quality both in 3D games and while viewing movies through it's TV-out. This is a great trait we've come to expect from all ATI graphic cards.

To be more specific, these are the main advantages of this video card:
1. It offers a brilliant image quality in games, provided the games themselves have a nice graphic to display. As most ATI video cards, the Radeon VE has built in texture filters, antialiasing features, directX 8.0 support, environment mapping, and many many others.
2. The possibility to extend the desktop on 2 monitors is amazing and gives you a great deal more workspace. When i was using this card, most of the time i would leave Winamp on one monitor and the application i was working with on the main one.
3. It is equipped (mine was at least) with both types of TV-out connectors: s-video and composite. It is also possible to connect 2 TVs at the same time, although i can't imagine why you would want that. All possible TV standards are covered: NTSC, 2 main types of PAL, 2 main types of SECAM. It is pointless to comment on the image quality on the TV since it's a known fact that ATI video cards have excellent TV-out features.
4. A plus are also the nice, user friendly controls for various features, available in the "display properties" menu. These not only look nice, but are also comprehensive, offering you control over all of Radeon's important functions.
5. ATI graphic cards generally do not get hot, and the Radeon VE stays particularly cold at all times, so it is shipped without an active cooling system. That's a plus since most modern graphic cards have noisy coolers, which add up to the already existing noise of the PC. Also, if you decide to replace it's small heat sync with an active cooler, you get a "ready-for-overclock" video card. You'll want to do this if you're a gamer. I'll explain later on.

Cheap video cards always have some inconvenients, and are never perfectly suited for all applications, or are equally but poorly suited for all applications. This card from ATI is in no way an exception, it too having some inconvenients, which i will enumerate below(only the ones i know for sure of course):
1. The Radeon VE is well known among IT profesionals as one of the few 3D video cards that actually does NOT have a geometric processing unit... That's a little strange and also sad, since it means the geometric calculations as well as rendering and various texture filtering procedures are done by the same graphic engine, which by far can't handle all of these tasks. Thus, don't expect fantastic performance in games, unless they're not the latest apparitions. So it's frustrating that the image quality is rather in vain as far as gaming is concerned. Being an ATI graphic card, all games including the latest will launch but some won't be playable, and that also because there's no geometric processor. If you can stand playing a game that runs only slightly slow, you may not be able to stand some areas with missing textures that appear because the graphic processor is simply overloaded with tasks and cannot render everything if the scene's textures are too variated. Here's a short list of games you should avoid if using this graphic card:
- Homeworld 2 - appears acceptable at first but some ships appear without textures; when there's a battle you loose because of slowdown
- Area 51 - runs too slow, no textures at all
- Punnisher - runs too slow
- Farcry - runs slow and there's missing textures, lots
- Need For Speed-anything later than the 4th is not playable
- Unreal Tournament-none of the versions are playable
There may be others but i haven't tried many games.
2. There's also a slight slowdown in 2D performance compared to single display cards, but not too noticeable. Strangely, this slowdown occurs even if all displays but the primary are disabled.

Summary: Great card overall but not the best one for the ever demanding 3D games

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