Powercolor hd5770 with Lucid hydra chip on board?

[happy medium]

One AT Review, circa Jan. 2010.

Synopsis: The tech is cool, but the performance sucks.

But this is a little different, its on the video card itself ,not on the motherboard.

 

[mfenn]

But this is a little different, its on the video card itself ,not on the motherboard.

Yes, I was responding to Idontcare's post where he wanted a review of Hydra in general...

 

[Idontcare]

thx mfenn for the follow-up but yeah actually I meant to say what happy hit on - a review of the updated hydra driver support with full dx11 and win7 supports on the latest hardware...for all the pr bullshit that got spun about hydra (perfect scaling, bla bla blah) it has yet to live up to any of it, but if the latest is finally getting there then I'd find that to be usefull to know.

 

[ViRGE]

If it is significantly improved, I'd be shocked. They've had what, nearly 2 years to work on the drivers?

 

[mfenn]

If it is significantly improved, I'd be shocked. They've had what, nearly 2 years to work on the drivers?

Yeah, that's my bet. Putting the chip at a different place on the bus isn't going to magically make the drivers not suck. Efficiently partitioning the workload at the API object level is just massively complicated.

Honestly, I don't expect Hydra to go anywhere at all. It's taken ATI and Nvidia years and years to get Crossfire and SLI scaling to be halfway decent and they've got 3 huge advantages over Lucid: (1) much simpler partitioning schemes (AFR and SFR), (2) much larger driver teams, (3) hardware support. Lucid is trying to tackle a much more complex problem with fewer resources, so yeah, my money isn't on them.

 

[3DVagabond]

Dude, I can't believe you would put that low-end Monster trash in your signal path! Go 24kt solid gold or go home, n00b.

:awe:

Now, if you're going to trash someone, at least get it right. While you would use gold plated connectors (to stop oxidizing) you would use silver wire, not gold. Preferably with Teflon dielectric.

 

[deimos3428]

It doesn't matter where on the bus the components lie, it is bidirectional.

Therein lies the genius, as you don't need to buy a Hydra motherboard, just the second video card you'd require to actually use Hydra anyway. (Though it'd be nice if it were an optional, socketed chip on all video cards, like boot PROMs on network cards.)

The main advantage of Hydra isn't necessarily combining ATi and Nvidia, anyway. It will also allow you to combine same-vendor cards in ways Crossfire and SLI don't. I'll use ATi card in my example as I'm most familiar with them. From what I understand, SLI has even stricter requirements for mixing card types.

Suppose you bought a 4870 a few years back and want to upgrade. Replacing it with a single 57xx card doesn't make much sense, so you're looking at either hunting around for another 48xx series card for Crossfire, or selling your perfectly good 4870 at a significant loss to buy a new 58xx card or a 57xx CF setup.

With a Hydra chip, you could just add in a 5770 (or 5750, or 4770, or 58xx, etc.) and retain the value of your 4870. This is much better bang-for-buck...but Crossfire won't do it. All this hinges on Hydra actually performing well, but at least it will try. On top of all that you could try mixing vendors, but I don't think that's the main advantage at all.