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Harnessing the Hydra - MSI Big Bang Fuzion

By Vincent Chang - 8 Jan 2010

Hydra Results

Hydra Results

You'll know that the Hydra engine is enabled from the logo displayed at the top left corner of the screen. This overlay can be turned off at the Hydra Control Panel.

For the ultimate proof of concept for mixing and matching ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards, the Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 285 worked in the games tested but the performance was mixed though we don't really have a direct comparison to this unique mode.

The same goes for the Hydra-enabled dual Radeon HD 4890 and GTX 285. Compared against native SLI, the Hydra implementation was slower generally but it did beat the CrossFireX duo of two Radeon HD 4890 marginally in 3DMark Vantage (which perhaps goes to say much about CrossFireX rather than Hydra). However that was a rare win as in Arkham, the Hydra Radeon HD 4890 lost quite thoroughly while it was mostly a draw in 3DMark06.

Finally, the warning from Lucid about mis-matching the GPUs hit home when we found that our mid-range GPUs (Radeon HD 4670 and GeForce 9600 GT) actually ended up dragging the performance down of the paired higher-end cards. In fact, if you Hydra such a combination as we did, the results were worse than just a single Radeon HD 4890 or GTX 285. Even if you're not concerned with results, this combination produced artifacts consistently, making it quite unplayable.

Putting a closer class of GPUs together, like the GTX 285 with the GTX 260 will enable one to reap the benefits of multi-GPUs.

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