RADEON VE, which is due in February will be priced at $130 and is very unlikely to offer acceptable 3D performance, since RADEON VE will have only one rendering pipeline and won’t have a T&L engine. The key feature of RADEON VE will be dual-monitor configurations support, which will make this card a perfect business solution, but not a gaming solution, unfortunately. That’s why now ATI can’t compete with GeForce2 MX because RADEON 32MB SDR costs considerably higher than its NVIDIA rival.
However, very interesting info about a new RADEON modification ATI is going to announce appeared in this Chinese web-site. In the nearest future ATI will supply the so-called RADEON LE (Low-End) graphics card. It will be destined to compete with NVIDIA GeForce2 MX in gaming applications. ATI will provide its RADEON LE with 32MB DDR SDRAM with 64bit bus to achieve this. As far as the number of rendering pipelines and a T&L engine are concerned, both will be present: RADEON LE will feature a fully-fledged Charisma engine and 2 rendering pipelines. However, RADEON LE may appear deprived of the HyperZ feature. As far as the working frequency is concerned, it will be reduced down to 150MHz.
This Low-End solution from ATI is said to be selling for only $100, which should make this graphics card a worthy purchase from the price-to-performance ratio viewpoint.
ATI hasn’t yet made any official announcements about its RADEON LE. As soon as we get some more info we will let you know.