NVIDIA and N-Mode Hydra
There was a reason why Asus sent all those cards to see how Hydra scales.  Again, it is well known that for the AMD market, the only SLI solutions out there are outdated motherboards that have been available for a few years now based on the 750A and 980A chipsets from NVIDIA.  Users wanting the combination of AMD processors and NVIDIA video cards in multi-GPU solutions are basically forced to use a Hydra setup if they want modern features like SATA-6G and USB 3.0 on their boards.

All cards were paired with their identical partners, with the exception of the hybrid mode GTX 480 combined with the HD 5870.   The cards listed with the “H” at the end mean these are cards in N-Mode Hydra.  So the GTS 450 H are actually 2 x GTS 450s in N-Mode.

3D Mark Vantage

The same performance settings were used as in the previous test.

Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform - General Tech 73

Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform - General Tech 74

Again we see good scaling on this benchmark when using multiple video cards.  Even the Hybrid mode shows a nice improvement over a single card.

Battlefield: Bad Company 2

Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform - General Tech 75

Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform - General Tech 76

Lucid Hydra Performance Review on the AMD Platform - General Tech 77

Well, that was disappointing.  Just as Hydra didn’t scale with the AMD cards in this title, neither does the NVIDIA based cards.  Identical performance pretty much from the single cards to the multiple, and in some cases Hydra showed slightly worse performance.

One thing that I have noticed is that Hydra just does not play well with cards that have less than 1GB of memory.  The GTX 460 768 MB versions showed a lot of stutter in actual gameplay, but once I moved to the GTX 460 1GB card most of that stutter was not present.


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