ATI Brings Multi-Monitor to the Masses

LAS VEGAS -- ATI wants to add one more item to your cluttered desktop: another monitor. At Comdex here this week, ATI is showcasing the Radeon VE, the newest member of its Radeon graphics board family.

The Radeon VE is targeted at mainstream graphics users, and ATI representatives claim that it offers the most advanced and economical multiple-monitor support available in a mainstream graphics card.

The card is expected to ship in February 2001, priced at $129. The Radeon VE includes DVI and CRT interfaces as well a TV-out jack. The board is built around a version of ATI's Radeon graphics chip, modified to support dual displays. To reduce costs, ATI removed one of the Radeon's two 3D-graphics pipelines. The Radeon VE will ship with 32MB of DDR memory, which should help keep 3D speed at a respectable level.

Swap Among Nine Screens

In the race for faster and faster 3D speeds, graphics boards vendors have largely neglected the two-dimensional desktops we spend most of our time using. ATI is looking to change that by shipping the Radeon VE bundled with HydraVision, a software utility developed by multiple-display experts Appian Graphics.

The software lets you spread your work over as many as nine virtual desktops (on two monitors) and switch among them with a simple mouse click or hot-key. HydraVision gives you a number of customization options. You can designate where each application appears, and you can stretch applications over both desktops. You can designate a different resolution and refresh rate for each monitor, and you can switch an application from one virtual desktop to another with the press of a hot-key.

Multiple-monitor support is available from other vendors, notably Matrox and NVidia, and business users appreciate the productivity-enhancing opportunities it presents. ATI hopes that the combination of HydraVision and the Radeon VE creates an inexpensive graphics upgrade focused on improving productivity. High-end financial and workstation users have been working with HydraVision for years, and ATI is the first to include the software with a mainstream graphics board through an exclusive relationship with Appian.