PCPOP, a Chinese web-site, which has already put up some info on the new low-cost graphics product from ATI – RADEON LE, today revealed the first benchmarks obtained on this graphics card and offered the card’s correct specification.
As it turned out, there will be fully fledged 128bit memory on this graphics card instead of the 64bit one as it had been announced before. RADEON LE will feature 4 32bit DDR SGRAM memory chips from Samsung. It will make 32x4=128bit.
So, it appears that the main difference between RADEON LE and the regular RADEON is just the absence of HyperZ support and lower working frequencies (150MHz against 166 or 183MHz). Unfortunately, PCPOP compared RADEON LE only with GeForce2 MX (its main competitor). As for us, we would be also very anxious to see its performance compared to the regular RADEON graphics card. We suspect that the performance difference between them won’t be too large...
As for the test results, RADEON LE appeared faster than GeForce2 MX in Quake3 32 bit mode (the test system was configured as follows: Athlon 650MHz, AMD-750 chipset). In fact, there is nothing to be surprised at, bearing in mind that RADEON and RADEON LE are very similar to one another and as you know, RADEON performs almost level with GeForce2 GTS. If we pass over to some real numbers, we will get the following picture (Quake3, demo001, 32bit mode):

Resolution	GeForce2 MX	RADEON LE	Advantage of RADEON LE
800x600	70.5	80	13.5%
1024x768	47.8	64	33.9%
1280x1024	31.8	37.4	17.6%

As for 16bit color mode when the memory bus bandwidth plays the major part, there were no tests held in this case. And we really wish there were some… However, they carried out a few experiments in 3DMark2000 instead. Of course, this is a very beautiful test, however, it shows quite abstract numbers. Nevertheless, we considered it important to mention these numbers here (3DMark2000 Pro 1.1, 32bit color mode):

Resolution	GeForce2 MX	RADEON LE	Advantage of RADEON LE
800x600	4253	4132	-2.8%
1024x768	2115	3021	42.8%
1280x1024	1945	2093	7.6%

Since it was not a serial sample that the guys had at their disposal, it’s still too early to conclude anything. There is still a lot of time left until these graphics cards appear in retail (especially taking into account that ATI has always been kind of slow). Nevertheless, we would like to stress that if RADEON LE comes into the market in the nearest future, if it remains as it is and doesn’t undergo any changes (for instance if it retains the 128bit memory) and if its price turns out just as the guys had promised (around $130), then GeForce2 MX really gets a very powerful competitor and a serious cause for concern.