[OT] ATI Radeon VE RFC

Hi all,...

... being aware that this is not related to GNOME at all and quite off-topic, 
I beg your pardon for posting this here. Though, I posted this some time 
earlier on [email protected] but seems there are too few people on that 
list to actually be able to give me some help, here. Even a "ask this in 
<name-of-mailing-list-more-appropriate-for-this>" would do well for an answer. 
TIA! :)

Well, some days ago I was astounded to finally see one of the 64 meg ATI 
Radeon boards in one of our German computer stores (sadly, those aren't very 
familiar around here) and immediately got this one, but, being home, I 
realized that there are two small letters VE appended to the cards name, so I 
was google'ing for this topic and saw several posts of persons both having 
severe problems with the Radeon VE and XFree86 or being totally disappointed 
with its performance. Dunno if anyone of you guys is owning / running / 
knowing about this board, but if so, and to make things short, please give me 
some hints on:

(a) Is it possible to get the ATI Radeon VE properly to work with XFree86 
4.2.0 (from slack-current or self-built) and kernel 2.4.18+ and DRI (I don't 
need both dual-head or tv-out - support, just want to have my single monitor 
to work properly with this card :] )?

(b) Comparing to the graphics board I am having inside my box now (Elsa Erazor 
III LT w/ TNT2 M64 chipset and nvidia.com - drivers), am I likely to have a 
performance gain by replacing this one with the Radeon VE board? Is the Radeon 
VE having at least the same performance (both 2D and OpenGL) as the TNT2M64 
has? 

(c) Seeing that the Radeon VE obviously is a "Radeon lite": Where exactly are 
the differences to a "real" Radeon board?

So, I'm thinking about whether to put this board into my box and finally being 
free of the proprietary NVidia drivers or, other side, to bring the Radeon VE 
back to the computer store. Give me some hints, please! :)

TIA, have a nice day everyone wherever you are.
Cheers,
Kris