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Follow us on FacebookLucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform
@ 2011/03/17Essentially NVIDIA has no plans for the current generation of CPUs and chipsets supporting AMD products. NVIDIA has gotten out of the chipset business and refocused those particular efforts on the Tegra series of products. So do not expect NVIDIA to turn around and license SLI to AMD on their 800 series of chipsets.
As for Hydra, the potential to be a solid multi-GPU platform is there. We see the highly optimized benchmarks give great results, but unfortunately the same can’t be said for most other applications. This might not always be true. I remember first running SLI with two 6800 GTs, and I was not particularly impressed with the results. Back then we saw much the same situation. 3D benchmarks were well optimized and showed the potential of the technology, and big games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 also showed great scaling. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the majority of other games out there. NVIDIA and AMD have persevered and continued to improve their multi-GPU technology, and now we see pretty universal scaling on most applications. Hydra will likely follow this pattern.
Lucid is not a large company, but their influence is spreading. With partners like Asus and MSI now actively putting the Hydra chips on quite a few boards, there will be considerably more money coming into the company. Also, R&D resources from these companies are likely also being utilized by Lucid, and we can only hope that driver releases and more advanced gaming profiles will be provided much more frequently. We have already seen a much steadier release of new drivers from Lucid once Asus really got on board with the technology.
As for Hydra, the potential to be a solid multi-GPU platform is there. We see the highly optimized benchmarks give great results, but unfortunately the same can’t be said for most other applications. This might not always be true. I remember first running SLI with two 6800 GTs, and I was not particularly impressed with the results. Back then we saw much the same situation. 3D benchmarks were well optimized and showed the potential of the technology, and big games like Doom 3 and Half-Life 2 also showed great scaling. Unfortunately, this was not the case for the majority of other games out there. NVIDIA and AMD have persevered and continued to improve their multi-GPU technology, and now we see pretty universal scaling on most applications. Hydra will likely follow this pattern.
Lucid is not a large company, but their influence is spreading. With partners like Asus and MSI now actively putting the Hydra chips on quite a few boards, there will be considerably more money coming into the company. Also, R&D resources from these companies are likely also being utilized by Lucid, and we can only hope that driver releases and more advanced gaming profiles will be provided much more frequently. We have already seen a much steadier release of new drivers from Lucid once Asus really got on board with the technology.
