ATI has announced that it has shipped its new mainstream graphics card, the Radeon VE. While the Radeon VE's aggressive pricing places it on the lower end of street prices for GeForce2 MX cards, the new ATI card is clearly focused more on 2D features like dual-monitor support than on 3D gaming performance. The Radeon VE includes the controllers for two monitors on the Radeon chip itself, which adds flexibility and lets users change their configuration on the fly, enabling or disabling the second monitor without a restart. The bundled Hydravision desktop management software adds a lot of useful control options on top of what's available in Windows' default multimonitor feature.

　　The Radeon VE uses a slimmed down Radeon core design similar to the recently announced Mobility Radeon. For the VE edition, ATI has cut out the Radeon's transform and lighting unit and has slimmed down the Radeon's dual pipeline design to a single pixel pipeline. Given the chip's 183MHz clock speed, this means that the Radeon VE is capable of a significantly lower fill rate than the GeForce2 MX: that is, 550 megatexels per second versus the 700 megatexels per second of the Nvidia chip. The Radeon VE ships with 32MB of DDR memory capable of 64-bit addressing, which is half the 128-bit memory path found on the more expensive Radeon DDR cards. The suggested retail price for the card is US$99.

　　We'll have a full GameSpot review of the Radeon VE soon.