Lucid Hydra Preview

[Trunks9486]

http://pcper.com/article.php?aid=815&type=expert&pid=1

Kind underwhelming compared to the linear claims they made back then...

Still, good to see cross vendor cards working!

 

[Toastor]

Nice link. Looks like it's working very well indeed. Anything that gives consumers more choice is a good thing.

 

[kylew]

I suspect that some of the issues with performance there are down to the odd secondary motherboard they were using.

The performance shown with the MSI bigbang board was 100% if I remember it correctly?

Saying that, I've also seen that secondary motherboard working with multiple GTX295s.

An average of 190FPS on crysis warhead with 3 GTX295s is disgustingly fast.

 

[Gerard]

I suspect that some of the issues with performance there are down to the odd secondary motherboard they were using.

The performance shown with the MSI bigbang board was 100% if I remember it correctly?

Saying that, I've also seen that secondary motherboard working with multiple GTX295s.

An average of 190FPS on crysis warhead with 3 GTX295s is disgustingly fast.

 

[kylew]

Indeed.

Here's a product page of the company who makes these secondary motherboard box things.

http://www.elsa-jp.co.jp/english/products/pes/vridge_x100_quad8/index.html

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Indeed, 6 GPU's, but i thought it was never gona see the light of day as Nvidia blocked it, or was that just MSI they blocked from doing the boards or something.

 

[Nuwidol]

you're right there...

 

[LoadsaMoney]

Actually when you think about it, thats utter crap for 6x GPU's.

 

[Mr Paul]

It actually works well

 

[kylew]

Actually when you think about it, that's utter crap for 6x GPUs.

Well it apparently doesn't use both GPUs in the 295.

 

[Rroff]

If you drop it out of SLI mode it should see each GPU in the 295 seperatly... in theory.

 

[Gerard]

Actually when you think about it, thats utter crap for 6x GPU's.

Well, we are talking cryis here.

 

[kylew]

From what I've read, that doesn't happen with 295s, they're supposed to be transparent to the PC.

So it just sees a GPU regardless of if it's on in the drivers or not.

 

[Rroff]

295GTX still shows as 2 different devices on the PCI-e bus... unless the NF200 switch onboard confuses the hydra chip I can't see why it wouldn't work.

 

[SfnX]

so if u think of it for frames per gpu x2 considerings the 295 is 2 gpus. so 195 fps divided by 6 = 32.5fps per gpu tbh its reasonable

 

[BubbySoup]

Huzzah for Lucid!

*Goes up into loft to dig out Orchid Righteous 3d*

 

[OrphanBoy]

I want to know how the the Hydra 'card' gets exposed to a game esp if the cards used have mixed specs.
For instance, if you plug in a DX 11 and a DX10 card which interface gets exposed? What about if an NV card and an AMD card go in, which rendering path will get chosen? Plus I think the image will definitely shimmer if AFR is used in conjunction with an NV card + AMD card: the image provided by the two vendors is often very slightly different (think different types of AF etc).

 

[kylew]

I want to know how the the Hydra 'card' gets exposed to a game esp if the cards used have mixed specs.
For instance, if you plug in a DX 11 and a DX10 card which interface gets exposed? What about if an NV card and an AMD card go in, which rendering path will get chosen? Plus I think the image will definitely shimmer if AFR is used in conjunction with an NV card + AMD card: the image provided by the two vendors is often very slightly different (think different types of AF etc).

You can set the primary card, and the chip itself interfaces with DX requests. It then delegates bits of work to how ever many GPUs there are available.