MSI Big Bang Fuzion: Pulling The Covers Off Of Lucid’s Hydra Tech

By Chris Angelini
published

Benchmark Results: 3DMark Vantage

To begin, 3DMark Vantage, which is a qualified application in all five supported rendering modes, demonstrates a Radeon HD 5870 and GeForce GTX 285 cooperatively generating lower scores than a Radeon HD 5870 on its own.

On the other hand, in A-mode, Lucid is able to achieve better scaling than CrossFire with a pair of Radeon HD 5870s in two of the three benchmark presets.

Then the reverse holds true in N-mode, where SLI on Asus’ P55-based platform consistently outruns the Hydra solution.

We bucked tradition and left the PPU option enabled for these tests, hoping that the GeForce card would be recognized in the CPU suite and used to compute PhysX-based optimizations in the benchmark. Unfortunately, when you follow guidance and use the ATI card in PCIe x16 slot one, you can’t even bring up the Nvidia driver control panel—much less employ PhysX in 3DMark Vantage. This is a known issue, according to Lucid, and being looked at currently.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.
52 Comments Comment from the forums
  • Maziar
    Nice article,its very good for users for upgrading,because for current SLI/CF you need 2 exact cards but with Lucid you can use different cards as well,but it still needs to be more optimized and has a long way ahead of it,it looks very promising though
    Reply
  • Von_Matrices
    I'm highly doubtful of the Steam hardware survey. I think it is underestimating the number of multi-GPU systems. I for one am running 4850 crossfire and steam has never detected a multi-GPU system when I was asked for the hardware survey. The 90% NVIDIA SLI seems also seems a little too high to me.
    Reply
  • Bluescreendeath
    The CPU scores for the 3D vantage tests are way off. You need to turn off PhysX when benchmarking the CPU or it will skewer the results...
    Reply
  • shubham1401
    Nice concept...
    A long way to go though.
    Reply
  • Bluescreendeath
    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/msi-fuzion-lucidlogix-hydra,2526-6.html
    Reply
  • Bluescreendeath
    So far, the best scaling has been in Crysis. The 5870/GTX285 combo benchmarks looked very promising.
    Reply
  • cangelini
    BluescreendeathThe CPU scores for the 3D vantage tests are way off. You need to turn off PhysX when benchmarking the CPU or it will skewer the results...
    It's explained in the analysis ;-)
    Reply
  • kravmaga
    "But when you spend $350 on a motherboard, you’re using graphics cards that cost more than that. If you’re not, you aren’t doing it right"

    Quoted from the last page; I disagree with that statement.
    There are plenty of people in situations where using this board is a better investment performance per dollars. This is all the more relevant as this technology will undoubtedly find its way into cheaper boards and budget oriented setups where it will make all the sense in the world to bench it using mid-end value parts.

    I, for one, would have liked to see what using gtx260s and 5770s would look like in this same setup. As is, this review leaves many questions unanswered.
    Reply
  • SpadeM
    Well the review does give an answer in the form of: It's better to run a ATI card for rendering and a nvidia card for physics and cuda (if u're into transcoding/accelerating with coreavc etc.) with windows 7 installed.
    Or at least that is the conclusion i'm comfortable with at the moment.
    Reply
  • HalfHuman
    i also agree with the fact that a person who will buy this board will necessarily go for the highest priced vid boards. maybe some will but not all. there will be more who will try to save the older vid cards.

    i also understand why you paired the 5870 with nvidia's greatest. there is a catch however... lucid guys did not have the chance to play with 5xxx series too much and you may be evaluating something that is not too ripe. i guess the 4xxx series would have been a better chance to see how well the technology works. couple that with games that are not yet certified for lucid, couple that with how much complexity this technology has to overcome... i think this is a magnificent accomplishment o lucid team part.

    i also think that in order for this technology to become viable it will go down in price and will be found in much cheaper boards. for the moment the "experimenting phase" is done on the expensive spectrum. i saw some early comparisons and the scaling was beautiful. i know that the system put together by lucid... but that is fine since that was only a demo to show that it works. judging on how fast this guys are evolving i guess that they will go mainstream this year.
    Reply