Lucid HYDRA 200 Mixed Multi-GPU Technology Performance Preview

Starting with the 3DMark Vantage results, you will see that the HYDRA scaling method with the pair of GTX 260+ cards pushed performance up by 83% - definitely a competitive solution to SLI! Considering the fact that this motherboard, in its theoretical construction, didn’t have to pay for any type of SLI licensing, I would say that THIS is the reason NVIDIA might have put pressure on MSI to delay the Big Bang motherboard.

When we take a look at the GTX 260+ combined with the GTX 285, the results are not what I initially expected. As most of you, I would assume that a configuration with a single GTX 260+ and a much more powerful GPU (the GTX 285) would produce a higher combined framerate than the pair of GTX 260+ graphics cards but that was not the case. Instead, the performance of the 260/285 combination happened to be nearly identical to the 260/260 results. Why is this? Lucid tells us that the software based algorithms for separating workloads across identical GPUs differs greatly from the one required for load balancing with non-identical GPUs and thus scaling will in fact differ. There is some software overhead and load balancing overhead that has to take place and that costs us some performance. We had to assume this would be the case but it just kind of goes against standard logic: 2 + 2 = 4 but also 2 + 3 = 4 in the case.