Lucid HYDRA results
Lucid HYDRA results
Of course the motherboard has an HYDRA chip on it allowing you to team up multiple GPUs. We won't lie about it, we are not a fan of LUCID HYDRA technology whatsoever, it's very limited and software dependant. Anyway should you want to fool around with is, make sure you pick up their latest driver from the Lucid Website.
| 3DMark Vantage | P Score |
| GTX 580 SLI | 32395 |
| GTX 580 Hydra | 32392 |
The first test we ran was 3DMark Vantage, the results where promising as we got near perfect scaling returned. But as we see so often... ODMs like Lucid make very sure that 3Dmark runs extremely well.
So we'll quickly test three games, we applied two GeForce GTX 580 cards, the first test run is in SLI, the second was with HYDRA enabled.
Crysis WarHEAD
If you are wondering what you only see SLI results in the above chart, well on all tests with Crysis Warhead the game executable crashed and dies with HYDRA enabled. Hence, no Hydra results.
Far Cry 2
In Far Cry two HYDRA did enable itself. Where the GeForce GTX 580 cards get near 1.9x scaling in HYDRA that number is much lower. BTW we kept settings as tested earlier, 4xAA High Quality mode enabled.
Anno 1404
Anno 1404 is setup with 4xAA and 16AF with all eye candy enabled in-game. This title performed quite well. Scaling is still 15% to 20% slower compared to SLI but you can't ignore the fact that it works nicely.
Would I opt Hydra of Crossfire or SLI? No Sir, it makes no sense to us whatsoever. Mixing different brands and models in the past gave us so much trouble that we really did not bother with that.
So Hydra remains a gimmick at best, a gimmick that you pay for... do not forget that. And also be aware of the fact that this motherboard runs Crossfire or SLi perfectly fine, so really... what is the added benefit of Hydra?
