Final words and conclusion

Final words and conclusion

Well then, conclusion time. I could round it up in just one sentence really, A+ for innovation from HIS, yet what a fail from LUCID.

First off, the card has been built great, good temps, nice low noise levels, very stable and it is overclockable to roughly 950 MHz. Yet we do have to focus on that one part the card is released for, LUCID Hydra 'MIX' functionality.

If HIS had done their homework then they should have learned that from the very beginning media around the world (and Guru3D tested this many times) is not exactly positive about LUCID Hydra. I mean, there's nothing worse than the hassle, driver setup, driver dependability and endless ongoing pile of issues with HYDRA. The scaling in our games, with an exception here and there, is sooo horribly bad. Sure, here and there Hydra kicks in, but it's not enough, in fact far from it. So you spend 325 EUR on the HIS R6970 ICEQ MIX card and then drop another 425 EUR on the GeForce GTX 580. You've just spent 750 EUR on the cards(!) ...to experience what you have been able to notice in our benchmarks.

You know what, let me break it down even further:

Here's what LUCID Hydra means to us when we crack down on the numbers. Theoretical 100% Scaling would be perfect 100% load balanced scaling. Now that is far fetched, but the reality is that six out of the 10 games show no or negative scaling, four games show scaling of which three out of the four scale up-to 1.4x and just one title shows up-to 1.7x scaling. Now, Far Cry 2 for example had 1.4x scaling which is 'okay', but add to that timedemo graphics corruption as well.

Now remember -- we added a 425 EUR graphics cards (GTX 580) and when we take the 1920x1200 resolution, sum up the results and calculate the relative performance in/decrease. You'll notice that overall and averaged out we had a 20% overall performance increase for 425 EUR, plus add to that the added costs of the LUCID implementation on the R6970, which is what... 40 EUR?

Here's a hint, get two R6970 cards for 500 EUR and you'll get 1.6x to 1.9x scaling on average with much better game-support. Hydra just does not make any sense. BTW in the table above 0.9x means negative scaling, thus less then 1 is negative, and everything above 1 is positive scaling. Would we have directly calculated scaling against the GTX 580, the numbers would have been even much worse.

So yes, as much as I would have liked this technology to work, it just doesn't. It gets worse though, even LUCID doesn't seem to really care, go to their driver download page and you'll notice that this application dependant software hasn't been updated since March 2011. So any game released after that date is not supported. Heck, not even Crysis 2 released back in January is available in the driver profiles.

As such this product is a big miss and a waste of the valuable R&D resources HIS put into it, and you know what? I respect HIS for the call to make this product, they believed in something new, refreshing and different, but unfortunately LUCID is not the company to go with.

Now let's filter out LUCID HYDRA, the HIS R6970 as a single GPU product overall is nice of course. So again let me reiterate this: whilst the Hydra solution is horrible, the card itself in a single GPU configuration is fine. In a previous article we already discussed the looks and aesthetics though, they aren't top notch but if you have a closed system or do not care about looks, then the card itself (and its performance) is commendable.

The Radeon HD 6970 is a really competitive product, and it surely took a while before we started seeing customized editions of the card. It's good to see that HIS is addressing that market as well but it seems that overall there's little benefit over a reference product. The ICEQ cooling performance itself is slightly better over the reference products but nothing ground breaking there either. In IDLE the product is downright silent, a huge plus. But once that GPU starts heating up during heavy gaming, you will be able to hear it, albeit softly. Nothing annoying, but again yeah... I've seen (well, heard) more quiet aftermarket cooling solutions.

 MIX mode activated

The R6970 overall remains what it is, it's a really fun product but sure, it does lack here and there in performance compared to the GTX 580 for example, Most of it is due to the updated micro architecture of the GPU. Anyway, overclock it a little more and you can squeeze another 5 to 10% performance out of a product that already offers real nice performance.

Connectivity wise the two DP connectors, HDMI and the two DVI connectors are nearly a little silly, in a good way of course. It could even suffice for a nice Eyefinity setup, though you'd need to pursue the CrossfireX alternative real fast for performance there.

Overall the noise levels are really nice and low, power consumption is very decent and your gaming experience will run up-to 1920x1200 extremely well, and all that with the very best image quality settings. Pretty much any game to date will have no issue whatsoever. The one point of contention will obviously remain its overall looks, some will be bothered, others do not care -- of course.

Anyway, overall we recommended you to go with the cheaper regular or ICEQ model of the HIS R6970 product range. The multi-GPU MIX mode is simply an unpleasant and expensive experience and as far as I am concerned not worth even an additional single EUR. But that doesn't mean that the product as tested today isn't a lovely card for you to play your games on, it's just that you do not want to spend extra money for anything LUCID Hydra related.

• Leave/read comments on this product
• Sign up to receive a notice when we publish a new article
• Or go back to Guru3D's front page