Lucid Hydra Benchmarks Finally!

[Dribble]

BSN isn't convinced:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...ally-ready2c-or-are-they-pulling-a-fermi.aspx

 

[Ben90]

NVIDIA also wanted to point out that the nForce 200 based MSI Big Bang Trinergy motherboard had been in development for quite some and in fact was show at CeBit this past March

Lol, i remember charlie saying that the trinergy mobo just appeared out of thin air and was a hack photoshop job.... But charlie being wrong isnt news, i dont even know why i posted this lol

 

[jvroig]

Lol, i remember charlie saying that the trinergy mobo just appeared out of thin air and was a hack photoshop job.... But charlie being wrong isnt news, i dont even know why i posted this lol

Maybe because you hate charlie and want to discredit him as much as you can? Not that you shouldn't - after all, Charlie is asking for it by being bashing nVidia at the drop of a hat.

 

[yacoub]

Let me know when I can see a comparison between SLI and Hydra, and Crossfire and Hydra, showing the % gain going from 1 to 2 of the same GPU (i.e. 1-2 260s, 1-2 5850s). Because if Hydra can offer a significant improvement over SLI and Crossfire for the same GPUs, I'd be more willing to take interest in it and consider the mixed GPU benefit as well.

 

[SunnyD]

One of the things that concerns me - Hydra explicitly states DirectX... but NOT OpenGL. I wonder what this means for all of id's titles...

I'm also inclined to think that as far as GPGPU goes, it will likely only be used (if at all) on DirectCompute. I wonder if it disables PhysX...

 

[Compddd]

Where is Wreckage to tell us that Lucid is the devil's company, and that the mighty Nvidia will soon put a stop to their foul hydra witchcraft?

 

[jvroig]

Wreckage has just recently been banned. Don't know if temporary or permanent.

 

[Creig]

Where is Wreckage to tell us that Lucid is the devil's company, and that the mighty Nvidia will soon put a stop to their foul hydra witchcraft?

He's probably doing so on ABT where all the rest of the, um... 'overly enthusiastic' Nv supporters who couldn't seem to contain themselves currently reside.

Or put in simpler terms, Wreckage has been banned from AT.

 

[Idontcare]

you guys are better than this, gents please find the high-road as it suits you better and you deserve nothing less

This is an excellent suggestion, I recommend it be followed. Remarks about the vacationed poster are OT and therefor somewhat derailing the OP's thread. Such remarks may also be seen as "a call-out" since that (vacationed) member is not particpating in this thread.

TIA

Fern
Super Moderator

 

[veri745]

Let me know when I can see a comparison between SLI and Hydra, and Crossfire and Hydra, showing the % gain going from 1 to 2 of the same GPU (i.e. 1-2 260s, 1-2 5850s). Because if Hydra can offer a significant improvement over SLI and Crossfire for the same GPUs, I'd be more willing to take interest in it and consider the mixed GPU benefit as well.

There probably won't be a gain going form crossfire or SLI to Hydra, but hopefully there won't be too much of a performance hit. it's really the cross-vendor solution and cross-family (e.g. 9800 + GTX) solutions that are interesting at all.

I'm not sure why you'd expect or even want far-superior performance for two identical cards when you can just throw them in SLI/CrossfireX

 

[firewolfsm]

I doubt ATI will lock it out. There are no XFire license fees like there are SLI fees so they don't really have a whole lot to lose. Unless people start to think that the IDEAL configuration is a mixed setup...then they lose potential sales.

No, because it works for those who would have bought nVidia as well.

 

[Elias824]

This is an awesome piece of technology, even if it cant compete with xfire sli. Its amazing from a point of using a newer and older cards, or just being able to toss a couple of whatever into your computer and having it work. Id probably go buy that msi board now if I was upgrading just to play around with it.

 

[jvroig]

This is an awesome piece of technology, even if it cant compete with xfire sli. Its amazing from a point of using a newer and older cards, or just being able to toss a couple of whatever into your computer and having it work. Id probably go buy that msi board now if I was upgrading just to play around with it.

Agreed. Unfortunately, you can't buy the board yet, even if you were upgrading now. The board isn't out yet, Charlie even had a conspiracy theory behind it that nVidia killed it. MSI, however, says it's just due next year, Lucid's just improving the drivers

 

[Creig]

This is an awesome piece of technology, even if it cant compete with xfire sli. Its amazing from a point of using a newer and older cards, or just being able to toss a couple of whatever into your computer and having it work. Id probably go buy that msi board now if I was upgrading just to play around with it.

I'd like to see more reviews before plunking down my money on a Hydra board. But it certainly looks compelling.

 

[jvroig]

I'd like to see more reviews before plunking down my money on a Hydra board. But it certainly looks compelling.

I second that, and if I may add, there certainly won't be a problem of lack of reviews of this product once it comes out. Something this exciting is bound to make headlines on all serious hardware review sites, as well as similarly-themed smaller blogs.

 

[exar333]

Right. Making two of cards of the same vendor scale isn't impressive; it's the ability to scale while using a mix of nVidia and ATi cards. I wonder how complicated the Hydra driver is - could it just be a library of API calls for both nV and ATi? Is that even possible?

I beg to differ that making two different cards of the same vendor scale isn't impressive. This solves two issues: (1) You have to have the same card for a CF or SLI to work (2) SLI and CF scaling issues.

If CF/SLI scales at 60%, and you increase that to 80-85%, that is a significant increase. That is like going from 3 cores to 4 cores on the CPU side with the same GPU hardware. Squeezing extra power out of existing HW is nothing to sneeze at.

On the mixed-vendor side, I would like to grab a 5870 and run it with my GTX285. That would be fantastic!

 

[AyashiKaibutsu]

but but I thought the evil nvidia empire had killed it and eaten it's babies? There was some incrediblely credibly person writing an article saying it must be so!

 

[GlacierFreeze]

Why would Nvidia or AMD want to lock this thing out? It can only help to promote multi GPU sales.

 

[jvroig]

I beg to differ that making two different cards of the same vendor scale isn't impressive. This solves two issues: (1) You have to have the same card for a CF or SLI to work (2) SLI and CF scaling issues.

What I meant was two cards of the same family, my wording was terrible, I used "different" to mean two unique physical cards of the same family - I realize now that it was a very poor choice of words which would be interpreted as you did 90% of the time. Since SLI / Crossfire requires the same model to be used in tandem, yes, another obvious benefit of Hydra - as noted by several posters - would be to just throw another new card at your rig, and you won't have to throw out your old card, whatever it is.

 

[ArchAngel777]

Look at the bottom three graphs here:

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17934/3

Here a multi-GPU 4980 is slower than a single 4890.

Lucid implied this shouldn’t happen because application specific optimizations in the drivers are not required. Clearly that isn’t the case.

The same point I was going to bring up. Most people here seem excited about this, but not me. I am actually very dissapointed with the Hydra. From what I can tell, it is just as inconsistent as Xfire or SLI. Sometimes it does ok, sometimes great and sometimes horrible. Not to mention we don't have information on microsutter, input lag, vsync, etc... Anyone praising this thing right now needs to hold off for a final product. Again, I am not impressed.

 

[Idontcare]

Hands on with Lucid's Hydra GPU load balancer

Based on our brief hands-on experience with the Hydra in Lucid's offices, though, we think MSI's trepidation about the drivers may be warranted. Lucid gave us a preview of the mixed-vendor mode in action, and predictably, we ran into a minor glitch: the display appeared to be very dark, as if the gamma or brightness were set improperly, in DirectX 10 applications. This was a preview of that nascent functionality, though, so such things were expected at this stage.

More troubling was the obvious visual corruption we saw in DirectX 9 games when using an all-AMD mix of a Radeon HD 4980 and a Radeon HD 4770. The Lucid employees we spoke with about this problem attributed it to Windows 7, and indeed, Lucid VP of R&D and Engineering David Belz told us that Windows Vista had been the driver team's primary focus up until the last month. Belz said they had found few differences when moving to Windows 7, but forthrightly admitted the firm might need to look into those differences further. Belz seemed surprised when he asked what percentage of prospective Hydra buyers might wish to run Windows 7 immediately and we answered, "Uhh... 99%." The Hydra comes attached to a new motherboard, though, so one would think that answer would be rather obvious at this point in time, even if our estimate might be overstated by a few percentage points.

Belz did express confidence that the issues we saw were rather trivial, likely not difficult to fix with software tweaks. Given what we've seen of the Hydra in action, we're not inclined to disagree with that assessment.

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17934

Further damning info's regarding Lucid's claims that MSI had no reasoning for delaying the hydra big-bang.

They only just recently began working on their Win7 drivers and yet they can't fathom why MSI was concerned with releasing the mobo?

I'm overwhelmed with confidence.

 

[EarthwormJim]

BSN isn't convinced:
http://www.brightsideofnews.com/new...ally-ready2c-or-are-they-pulling-a-fermi.aspx

Main evidence is that the pictures are all of the same piece of hardware, what? We're supposed to eat up this guys far-fetched ideas?

I thought it was pretty clear that several journalists were brought in on the same day to preview this hardware.

 

[Hyperlite]

Further damning info's regarding Lucid's claims that MSI had no reasoning for delaying the hydra big-bang.

They only just recently began working on their Win7 drivers and yet they can't fathom why MSI was concerned with releasing the mobo?

I'm overwhelmed with confidence.

Blame it on a fledgling company with a potentially great product wanting to get it out the door. The hardware is done (presumably?). I'd readily buy a hydra board right now, even if it had some quirks. It'll get worked out in software.

Now, the apparent surprise over the W7 user base...well, yeah, i'm not really sure what to say about that. Odd, certainly. The lack of foresight in NOT focusing on W7 drivers is puzzling, and makes me think that they expected this thing to come to market some time ago...certainly before the W7 launch.

 

[Zap]

Any news of an x58 big bang? or other x58 mobo's with the lucid hydra chip? Seems kinda silly to have all this potential of graphics power and not have gulftown potential

True, but perhaps they wanted to aim after a larger potential market - midrange stuff usually outsells high end stuff quite handily. Also, higher end boards have almost as many PCIe lanes as anyone could wish for while socket 1156 is limited and thus may benefit (however little) from anything that gives it more lanes. Finally, perhaps people buying higher end gear would go for higher end cards as well, and usually stick with the same higher end card. After all, why have a top notch system and then stick a midrange card in as a helper? If it were me, I'd do two (or more) highest end cards in a high end system, and that usually means the same card.

I'd readily buy a hydra board right now, even if it had some quirks. It'll get worked out in software.

Aren't people tired of paying to be beta testers?

This solves two issues: (1) You have to have the same card for a CF or SLI to work (2) SLI and CF scaling issues.

Don't know how (2) will work out - time will tell. For (1) I think this is great for a mid-range system that gets upgraded over time. For SLI (and maybe lesser extent Crossfire) how irritating is it for people to buy a card and expect to buy the matching card as an upgrade in a year... only in a year that matching card is no longer made? With this solution there is no need for a matching card.

Lol, i remember charlie saying that the trinergy mobo just appeared out of thin air and was a hack photoshop job.... But charlie being wrong isnt news, i dont even know why i posted this lol

Yeah, anything he gets wrong (like there being no chance in hell for Nvidia to put two G200 cores on one card) just gets swept under the server cabinet.

 

[BFG10K]

Not to mention we don't have information on microsutter, input lag, vsync, etc...

With regards to micro-stutter and input lag, they should be non-existent since Hydra is an SFR solution. But yeah, I take your point.