as promised here is a video showcasing
the Lucid logic Hydra engine and so that
is the chip on this particular motherboard this is the MSI 870a fusion
and you can see I have one 5870 and one GeForce GTX 480 you can't
really see that but it says 480 there I assure you it does and I am running
these in here we are we'll bring up the
uh hydrologics engine control panel so
I'm running them in an enable hydr Logics and I'm actually running them in X mode now I'm just going to show 3D
Mark Vantage um but one I just want to
talk briefly about the advantages and disadvantages of Hydra first of all the
an advantage is that it allows you to run two NVIDIA cards together for a
performance increase on an AMD chipset which is what we're doing here I
actually ran those numbers as well it also allows you to run two ATI cards
either in crossfire mode or in hydrolics
mode and then you can ALS o run two
mixed cards from completely different manufacturers for a performance boost so
it gives you that flexibility another thing it allows you to do is take cards
from completely different Generations like a 5800 and a 5700 and run those
together for a performance increase very cool stuff now the disadvantage is that
you do depend on the drivers from Lucid
so that's where you're going to get support enabled for whatever games you
want to run uh with this particular configuration so it's not going to work
in everything and compatibility was a wee bit spotty according to my testing
but uh here you are I'm going to launch Vantage and then I will show you it
actually does run and you do get a tangible performance boost kind of cool
here it is here is the evidence that it does actually work check this out we are
in X mode dx10 you can you can disable this little badge here obviously well
not obviously but you can you can do it and uh so it'll say a mode or n mode
when you're in uh the various modes so
here are the two cards and I'm not cheating see there's no other system
here there's a lot of other parts probably systems worth of Parts but see
you can clearly see that one's not plugged in and uh you can clearly see
that these graphics cards are not plugged into motherboards neither is
that one so not not that one
either that hard drive clearly not plugged into a system so there's no
Wizardry going on here it is actually working so I'll show you the score in a
minute so there you have it if you ever
wondered what would a GTX 480 plus a
5870 score in 3D Mark Vantage there it
is about 18,000 points so just for some context the scores that I got compared
to this are about 14,000 3D marks for an
individual 5870 14,000 about 14.5 about
15,000 for a single 480 and then I also
got a score running two 480s of about 19,000 so you can clearly see the 480 is
a little bit more powerful than the 5870 and then when you add them together you
get something that's a little bit less than 2480 so it's uh seems to work
pretty well in Vantage although my conclusion about the technology as a
whole is that the driver support isn't quite there yet but it looks very
promising and very cool at this time