About the Hydra : AnandTech did review the new hydra chips and well to what i've seen it seems like it will be working, but it will take a long time before every game works flawlessly with the Hydra technology (driver) and the performance boost seems like it will never get anywhere near the performance of real crossfire and real SLI. At least not until they do a lot of work on the driver.
The main positive point on the first look of the results seems to be able with Hydra to keep our "old" video card when we buy a new one. Couple a 5850 with a 4890 gives a <= 30% boost overall over the the 5850 alone... and and 5850 coupled with a GTX280 gives < 10% bonus in fps overall in the game tested (Call of Juarez, RE5, Batman, etc... there's not a ton of game actually supported by Hydra it seems, Crysis is not one of them).
Also they had weird result with any game with GTX280 + 9800GTX with hydra, like 30% or more FPS lost with this couple in everygame and some the just wont work.
It's too soon to talk about real bench since its not release atm but i think it will take a long time before i can consider Hydra a viable solution.
It's frustrating enough when i cant play a game without crashing to desktop because of my video card driver... if you add to that an Hydra drvier... You double the chance of something that goes wrong =/
On a side note, the new MSI board doesnt come with SLI on it, so if you don't like the result of your Hydra settings, you're forced to go into ATI crossfire. Not a big deal but it's good to know.
BuddyJ
Dept. of PropagandaOKC Icrontian
Comments
it would be interesting to see how that might work with workstation GPUs or with top Firestream and Tesla cards running together.
The main positive point on the first look of the results seems to be able with Hydra to keep our "old" video card when we buy a new one. Couple a 5850 with a 4890 gives a <= 30% boost overall over the the 5850 alone... and and 5850 coupled with a GTX280 gives < 10% bonus in fps overall in the game tested (Call of Juarez, RE5, Batman, etc... there's not a ton of game actually supported by Hydra it seems, Crysis is not one of them).
Also they had weird result with any game with GTX280 + 9800GTX with hydra, like 30% or more FPS lost with this couple in everygame and some the just wont work.
It's too soon to talk about real bench since its not release atm but i think it will take a long time before i can consider Hydra a viable solution.
It's frustrating enough when i cant play a game without crashing to desktop because of my video card driver... if you add to that an Hydra drvier... You double the chance of something that goes wrong =/
On a side note, the new MSI board doesnt come with SLI on it, so if you don't like the result of your Hydra settings, you're forced to go into ATI crossfire. Not a big deal but it's good to know.
As mentioned some games they just flat out suffer or lack support because of driver issues.
If there is a price premium, I don't think it is worth it... yet.