Building a new system? Lucid Hydra 200

Don't. Wait until lucid's hydra 200 drops and see if it lives up to the hype. No use wasting money now if you can spend the same thing a few months later and drop in your existing video card for linear scaling performance multi-core graphics.

Looks neat.

But does it have any support yet? And if not, then when?

From the sound of it, it's vendor neutral, meaning the only company that needs to support it is Lucid and the motherboard manufacturers. If MSI is in on it, I'm sure Asus and ABIT will follow. It will just depend on demand.

Don't be surprised if Nvidia does something to cock block though. If I were AMD, I'd embrace this technology as they're on their deathbed.

The way it works is: Lucid developed the chips, they license them to mobo manufacturers, and the mobo manufacturers put the chip on their boards. The cost added to said motherboards varies based on the number of pci-e lanes, but will probably be around $50-$70 according to Lucid's numbers.

The chip basically sits between the CPU and GPU (figuratively, and possibly literally in some cases). It takes commands sent to the GPUs and load balances them between however many GPUs there are in the system. The results are then handled again by the Hydra and finally sent to the primary display device.

This means that you can take the GTX 260 (or whatever you have) that is currently in your system.....and add it to your next system.....along with an ATI 58xx (or whatever you want).

Thus, your next upgrade could mean double your current graphics performance.


Edit: Also, The first mainstream board to come out with the Hydra 200 (that I know of) is the MSI (yuck, but oh well) Big Bang Fuzion (not to be confused with Big Bang Trinergy which doesn't have the Hydra), which is due out in Q1 of 2010.

Thanks for the info Bard.

I have actually been debating building a new rig, I think I will hold off now though :p sounds interesting to say the least.

http://www.tomshardw...uzion,2769.html

Review of the Hydra setup.

Cliffs: SLI / Crossfire is still better. Which isn't surprising, as the Hydra chip surely adds some overhead.

Cham said:

maybe. MSI was just the first company to make a board with the chip on it. Asus is starting to come out with hydra boards now. They have a really high end amd board right now with hydra. The one I'm interested in isn't out yet. It has a decent ati card on board, something like a 5770. So when you put a card in it will still get the benefit of the on board 57xx via the hydra.

The tech just needs a chance to mature I think. Also, nvidia are being douchebags about it from what I've read. Evidently they don't want video card mixing......racists.

The problem is game support, not hardware support. Games aren't writing drives to take advantage of the tech since it's so niche.

The AMD board with the 5770 means dick if the game isn't going to support Hydra. There were several games that actually performed on par with a single card. Real world performance means more to mean then benchmarks in 3DMark.

It's lucid who needs to write better game profiles. Performance could change vastly in a single driver update. Lucid just needs to grow. Hopefully adoption by companies like Asus facilitates that. Games don't have to support hydra, hydra has to support games...if that makes sense.

edit: all of this doesn't really matter anyway. In the context of this thread it's not worth using in a new system. It's still something that may or may not develop in the next couple years though.