Gadgetory

as promised here is a video showcasing the lucid logic Hydra engine and so that is the chip on this particular motherboard this is the MSI 878 fusion and you can see I have one 5870 and one geforce gtx 480 you can't really see that but it says 480 there I assure you does and I am running these in here we are will bring up the hydrologic engine control panel so I'm running them in in enable hydrologic sand I'm actually running them in X mode now I'm just going to show 3dmark vantage um but one I just want to talk briefly about the advantages and disadvantages of Hydra first of all the advantage is that it allows you to run to nvidia cards together for a performance increase on an AMD chipset which is what we're doing here I actually ran those numbers as well it also allows you to run to ati cards either in crossfire mode or in hydrologic smod and then you can also run to mixed cards from completely different manufacturers for a performance boost so it gives you that flexibility another thing it allows you to do is take cards from completely different generations like a fifty eight hundred and fifty seven hundred and run those together for a performance increase very cool stuff now the disadvantage is that you do depend on the drivers from lucid so that's where you're going to get support enabled for whatever games you want to run with this particular configuration so it's not going to work in everything and compatibility was a wee bit spotty according to my testing but here you are I'm going to launch Vantage and I'll show you it actually does run and you do get a tangible performance boost cut into cool here it is here is the evidence that it does actually work check this out we are in X mode dx10 you can you can disable this little badge here obviously well not obviously but you can you can do it and so it'll say a mode or n mode when you're in the various mode so here are the two cards and I'm not cheating see there's no other system here there's a lot of other parts probably systems worth of parts but you see you can clearly see that one's not plugged in and you can clearly see that these graphics cards are not plugged into motherboards neither is that one so not not that one either at hard drive clearly not plugged into a system so there's no wizardry going on here it is actually working so i'll show you the score a minute so there you have it if you ever wondered what would a gtx 480 plus a 5870 score in 3dmark Vantage there it is about 18,000 points so just for some context the scores that I got compared to this are about 14,000 3d marks for an individual 5870 14,000 minute for about 14.5 about 15,000 for a single 480 and then I also got a score running 24 80s of about 19,000 so you can clearly see the four ideas a little bit more powerful than the 5870 and then when you add them together you get something that's a little bit less than 2 480 so it's a seems to work pretty well advantage although my conclusion about the technology as a whole is that the driver support isn't quite there yet but it looks very promising and very cool at this time