Hydra Installation

Installation

Today we'll try out several multi-GPU configurations with the Big Bang Hydra. Some combos worked, some did not, some acted weird and others worked really great.

Installation itself is business as usual. You insert the two cards, install the Radeon Catalyst and GeForce Forceware drivers. Once they have been installed, you can install the Hydra driver as supplied on the MSI driver CD.

X-Mode
Our first setup is to mix two graphics cards from both ATI and NVIDIA. First off let me say how unnatural it feels to have a GeForce GTX 280 AND a Radeon HD 5870 in a PC.

Once both cards are installed and you have the Hydra driver up and running, all you need to do is check whether or not Hydra is disabled/enabled. After that you are good to go. It worked quite well with the software titles supported.

R-Mode In R-Mode we tried out several combos of Radeon 5870, 4770, 4850 and 4890. The results varied but when games were supported at the very least it worked in some way or form, which is more than we can say of the N-mode.

N-Mode
The weirdest thing, utilizing two NVIDIA GPUs simply would not work for us. We tried several combos with a GTX 285, GTX 275, 9800 GTX+ and 9600 GT. We tried several sets of ForceWare drivers (the recommended ones by Lucid/MSI) and even tried out a beta revision 1.4 Hydra driver. All to no avail:

With each and any tryout the driver would bite us in the ass, disallowing Hydra to be enabled. We tried official 185.85, 190.38 and 191.07 drivers from NVIDIA as recommended. So this review will unfortunately not show results done with multiple NVIDIA GPUs.

At a later stage, once this bug is squashed we'll likely revisit this article and add the results though. Hey, this is brand new technology, things like this happen. Let's move onwards to our test results.

Hydra Multi-GPU tests

Okay it's time for some numbers. Now as stated we had issues with pretty much any combo of two GeForce graphics cards so had to forfeit on that. We will test in four setups:

• In X-mode with a GeForce GTX 285 and Radeon HD 5870.
• In X-mode with a GeForce 9800 GTX+ and Radeon 4770
• In R-Mode with a Radeon HD 4850 and 4870
• In R-Mode with a Radeon HD 4770 and 5870

You'll notice on all tests that putting a very fast card and a slow one together really isn't something you want to do as in all cases the Radeon HD 5870 performed slower than it did in a single GPU setup.

We'll stick to the titles from which we know work with the current drivers, and sure... we realize that is subjective as heck but we want to show you what Hydra 200 is capable of and not merely focus on its limitations. First up, 3DMark Vantage.