Up coming hydra

[ncc74656]

so i am building a new system most likly with the new msi fuzion when its realsed. i had an idea of using a 5970 with a 9600 nvidia.. for physix, would that help, would anyone think it might improve performance beyond the scalability of the 2 cards GPU's or would the phyix on the nvidia card/driver eaven work in taht config...? im toying with the idea as i have a crap load of 8800,9600,9800 nvidia cards that im not using..

 

[jedimasterben]

How do you have a crapload of extra cards?? Share the wealth!

But anyways, yes, you can indeed use a 5970 with the nVidia card doing PhysX, but you won't be able to use Hydra with it, as the 9600 would only be used for PhysX, and not general processing like Hydra will made to do. I can guarantee that PhysX will not be enabled for the Hydra platform (at least not from nVidia. I'm sure someone will hack it in eventually).

 

[renz496]

if i'm not mistaken the hack are already out for quite sometime but from what i've heard before it only working on win 7. not sure if they already make it available for vista and XP. also i've read somewhere (sorry i can't remember which site it is) that the upcoming Hydra only supporting up to ATI HD 4000 and for nvidia it will be their 200 series.

 

[gamerk316]

Last I heard on Hydra, it only worked on GT200 and ATI 4000 series cards (that...would be a minor problem if true...). I'd hold off until we know EXACTLY what the chip can do...

 

[renz496]

thats right. we can only hope right now

 

[daedalus685]

ANy reviews show it works about as well as crossfire or SLI in certain games, and not at all in many others. The support is simply not there yet, which is why it has been delayed so much.

However, Hydra has nothing to do with running a 9600 and a 5970 together. It is only for running cards in a variety of multi GPU "crossfire/sli like" set ups. There would be no poin tin runnign a 9600 with a 5970 (for many obvious reasons besides it not working properly). However, you can get around the physX drivers killing it on a system that uses ATI with a 'hack,' as mentioned. This works in any system with the appropriate PCIe slots, and is not limited to hydra.

To put it in perspective, the 4850 + 4870 test of hydra I have seen performed worse than the 4850 + 4850 most of the time due to the overhead of splitting up the work load. Certainly this will change as the drivers improve, but that overhead will always kill teh point in any crazy mix where one card is so much more powerful than another (like your example). I cannot see hydra ever working so well that it could run a 9600 with a 5970 config that would not work slightly less well than a 5970 on its own. Obviously dx11 vs dx10 woudl complicate things even more.

Don't get me wrong.. I think that asynchronous computing, coupled with asynchronous loading is a wonderful thing. But there will always be overheads to make it kind of useless unless the cards are pretty close to begin with.