Lucid hydra

mother board is the new Gigabyte Ga-890 FXA UD7 AM3

Lucdi Hydra is for mix-and-matching ATI and Nvidia for Xfire + SLi.
You don't need a GTX480 for physX.

iirc, there isn't any significant improvement in physX after you go beyond a 8800/9800GT

Best answer selected by seanny.

Did you know they are looking at making a Graphics card with teh Hydra chip built in ?

http://www.fudzilla.com/content/view/19056/34/

Mactronix

He's actually not talking about Hydra, though... If looking to run an nVidia card for PhysX, I'd get something like an 8600GT, 9500GT, or GT 220.

You don't something powerful to do PhysX calculations, with a 9500GT, I got just as good of a framerate in PhysX games as I did with an 8800GT doing PhysX (main card for processing the graphics was an ATI HD4830).

So with a thread title like "Lucid hydra " you come to the conclusion that he not talking about hydra ??

Mactronix

It's called hybrid PhysX, there's a patch for it on NGOHQ. Patches nVidia drivers and PhysX software to allow ATI GPUs to be the main processor for games.

From what I've read in the past, Hydra will not support things like PhysX processing on proper GPUs in hybrid mode.

A 480 for PhysX is super mega overkill. Tops you'll want something like a GT 280. Also there are issues with running crossfire 5970s in some games. IMO spend half as much and get crossfire 5870s which will still destroy all games. My OCed crossfire 5850s can run anything at max - Crysis and Crysis: Warhead at highest settings (Crysis 2xAA, C:W 4xAA) with average 50+fps, and Metro 2033 everything maxed DX 11 with tesslation and depth of field, plus using advanced PhysX on a GT 240 and again it gets 50+ average fps. Also the GT240 generally only goes to about 20% usage at max 30%, although a game like Batman would certainly stress it harder.

Hell, on Batman AA, when I was using a 9500GT, it saw about 20-30% usage with full PhysX on.

Thanks for the link.Awesome to see early technology.

again thanks.This is the stuff that interests me."Wow factor" components.Its always cool to see where technology goes even if some fail.Its worth it seeing it all.

Timop, that's freaking crazy, thanks for sharing that link. Same for you Mactronix, it's nuts that they're integrating that chip in GPU boards too.

As for Hydra with PhysX, check this link out: http://physxinfo.com/news/1577/lucid-hydra-and-ati-nv-p...

Few things about HYDRA - they made major progress in their last drivers and they match SLI/Crossfire performance. You can download their latest drivers directly from their web site

http://www.lucidlogix.com/driverdownloads.html

As for Physix support in the mixture ATI/Nvidia cards - HYDRA allows you to allocate the Physics to the Nvidia card while the other ATI cards can enhance the graphics - so you can enjoy both worlds

As for the graphics cards with HYDRA - you are correct - the first graphics card to include HYDRA is by powercolor and it was already shown in Computex. With this type of card - you can use your motherboard that does not have HYDRA ASIC on it and still fully benefit from the HYDRA engine