Oh man, this technology makes me drool. Do effing want! If a manufacturer comes out with an AM3 board with a HYDRA chip I WILL upgrade (cost depending). Unless of course the HYDRA chip ONLY works for Intel architecture, you didn't really touch on that aspect of it.
Any motherboard manufacturer can implement HYDRA for any CPU architecture. Its proliferation depends strictly on the motherboard makers' collective will to shirk convention.
Thrax mentioned at the end the one thing I kept thinking... will NVidia and/or ATi try to circumvent this chip by creating future drivers or GPU's that "for some unfortunate reason" doesn't play nice with HYDRA.
I wonder if one of them will try to license it so it will benefit them exclusively? It would be a nice selling point for either NVIDIA or ATI to say "our multi-gpu setups scale way better than the competition." In my mind, they were fools not to buy this tech up by now. And I'm glad, because I'll giggle like a schoolgirl if I can get a GeForce and a Radeon to play nice together.
Who seriously could not love that? Even ATI and Nvidia, what potential harm will it do to them? Zero that I can see, it just provided a greater value to having a 2nd card, so its win/win the way I see it.
Who seriously could not love that? Even ATI and Nvidia, what potential harm will it do to them? Zero that I can see, it just provided a greater value to having a 2nd card, so its win/win the way I see it.
I'm only speculating, but do they licence out SLI and Crossfire to MB manufacturers? If so and MB decide to go with HYDRA instead they potentially loose out on said licencing.
Yes, SLI and CF is a cross-licensing thing. Mobo and chipset makers pay a fee to get their goods on the support list cooked into drivers, and in return they receive a kickback for driving SLI/CF sales.
It's a lucrative ecosystem, and HYDRA threatens that. This is potentially a big problem, most of all for LucidLogix, but for the incumbents as well.
Dangit Thrax, I was going to write this! /writernerdrage
This tech makes my mouth water. The way it only renders certain aspects of a scene per card to keep the loads manageable and then reconstructs the image is the stuff dreams are made of.
Well there are two ways to look at this, yet they will loose money on the licenses, but lets be honest, how many people buy a second card for a 30% increase. I think they would sell a lot more for a 90% step up and not having to find the exact same card is great. I am afraid Ati/Nvidia will buy them out or sue them to death.
Now that it's coming out, I wouldn't be surprised if AMD and nvidia have a solution that'll deliver the same type of performance increase. This has been lurking around for 2 years now, they would have to be idiots to not develope anything. Up until now there just wasn't any sort of incentive to do so. This has the potential to destroy their mid to high range products.
That said, I doubt amd or nvidia would do a driver update that would disable hydra. They may do something that won't let it work with each others cards. If Nvidia were to somehow disable hydra with a driver, it would be a huge boost to AMD's sales and visa versa. However, if they jointly decide to do something about it, that's a different story.
I do have some question. Games look differently on a comparable AMD card vs a Nvidia card, how exactly do they work that out if you can mix cards? Also what about dx11 and dx10 card playing a dx11 game? There has to be a catch somehere.
I wonder if they (ATI/NVIDIA) might license the chip to put on dual GPU boards? Am I correct in assuming that a dual GPU board is typically about as powerful than two single GPU boards in SLI?
Sort of... Two cards use the SLI/CrossFire bridge (the short dongle that connects the cards). The X2-style cards use an onboard bridge chip that allows for direct communication. The problem, really, is that the load balancing is handled by the drivers... The drivers are bad at it, which is why they're constantly adding profiles and improving existing ones.
So many fascinating possibilities with this. As an enthusiast I would replace my motherboard in a heartbeat. I think its going to be up to us to pressure Nvidia and ATI to do whats right for us on this one.
This just came to mind but AFAIK ATi doesn't have a Physics PPU like NVidia has. Does Hydra give us complete abilities of both cards? IE playing a game on several monitors using eyefinity, while letting the game use the Physics PPU on an NVidia card? So not only are you getting better performance with the two cards combines but also their benefits that the other card may not have.
Oh mah god, I can't believe I missed this article. Does this mean if I buy a 5870 and upgrade to a mobo with a Hydra chip, I can pair it off with my GTX 285 as the secondary card? That would be sweet beyond belief.
Edit - however expecting the answer to be no. It occurs to me that what I'm considering is a DX11 and a DX10 card. May not work well.
(Two concurrent posts because it's not easy to edit on my phone). It also stands to reason that you would indeed be able to use the benefits of both cards as each card's drivers are loaded and, therefore, working to intercept api calls like physics.
I think, rather than GPU manufacturers trying to license Hydra, one of the major chipset or motherboard vendors needs to jump on this quick.
If Intel could snag this and be (for a while) the exclusive vendor of Hydra-enabled kit, it would be huge for their MoBo business. Then, when they've gotten a bit of saturation, they can license it out to MSI, ASUS, and the like, reaping cash benefits on both sides of the business.
On another note, I wonder how long it will take for some unknown person/company to sue over Hydra because they claim it's too similar to their patent. Sorry, but it seems there's always someone to do this, legit or not.
Only advantage I see to this would be to test different gpus on one motherboard. Also, you could use a ATI gpu for graphics and nvidia card for physX but I would never do that. If I am going to use a gpu its going to be either ATI or nVidia... Not both. But that's just me.
The real advantage to this is getting better performance than a 5850 Crossfire or GTX295 SLi setup with MUCH cheaper cards. If you can pair a couple of 4770s and get actual 1:1 scaling - meaning twice the performance of a single 4770 - the $600 cards start looking a lot less necessary.
snarkasm,you make a great point.by the way intel has invested money on hydra.hopefully they're not influencing them not to make chips for amd any time soon.i was planning on getting a asus formula 3 but i'll be saving for an am3 hydra instead.
Thrax
🐌Austin, TX Icrontian
Comments
Any motherboard manufacturer can implement HYDRA for any CPU architecture. Its proliferation depends strictly on the motherboard makers' collective will to shirk convention.
I'm only speculating, but do they licence out SLI and Crossfire to MB manufacturers? If so and MB decide to go with HYDRA instead they potentially loose out on said licencing.
It's a lucrative ecosystem, and HYDRA threatens that. This is potentially a big problem, most of all for LucidLogix, but for the incumbents as well.
This tech makes my mouth water. The way it only renders certain aspects of a scene per card to keep the loads manageable and then reconstructs the image is the stuff dreams are made of.
I am so frigging pumped I can't stand it. My next build must contain Hydra 200 if these claims pan out.
That said, I doubt amd or nvidia would do a driver update that would disable hydra. They may do something that won't let it work with each others cards. If Nvidia were to somehow disable hydra with a driver, it would be a huge boost to AMD's sales and visa versa. However, if they jointly decide to do something about it, that's a different story.
I do have some question. Games look differently on a comparable AMD card vs a Nvidia card, how exactly do they work that out if you can mix cards? Also what about dx11 and dx10 card playing a dx11 game? There has to be a catch somehere.
Edit - however expecting the answer to be no. It occurs to me that what I'm considering is a DX11 and a DX10 card. May not work well.
If Intel could snag this and be (for a while) the exclusive vendor of Hydra-enabled kit, it would be huge for their MoBo business. Then, when they've gotten a bit of saturation, they can license it out to MSI, ASUS, and the like, reaping cash benefits on both sides of the business.