Hydra Results: Native Crossfire vs. A-Mode
I first wanted to see how well Hydra scales against a native solution. Since the board I am using only supports Crossfire and the Hydra modes, I used 2 x HD 5870 video cards to gauge how well Hydra scaling compares to a pretty mature Crossfire mode. Three ways were tested; single HD 5870, HD 5870s in native Crossfire mode, and then HD 5870s in Hydra A-mode.3D Mark Vantage
If there is going to be any scaling of the still relatively new Hydra technology, it will definitely be seen here. It is always worth the developer’s time to optimize and make sure these particular benchmarks run at their highest level. This will give us a good baseline of what “should” be achievable with good scaling.
Sure enough, we see the scaling here that we would expect. Hydra is just slightly faster than Crossfire here, but the difference is pretty minimal. Both show good scaling from the single card result.
Battlefield: Bad Company 2
This very popular game utilizes the Frostbite engine, which applies some decent DX10 effects, and offers speedups of said effects by utilizing DX11 functionality. A manual runthrough was captured using FRAPS. All settings were placed at Very High with 4X AA and 16X AF and HBOA disabled.
Well, that is a bit disappointing. We do see a performance increase while using Hydra over a single card, but the scaling is nowhere near what native Crossfire is able to do.
As in for up-to-date
As in for up-to-date applications, I am looking for a reliable reader of exe files for some of my gadgets: zune, smart phone. I don`t know for sure how these things work, but as long as we`re talking about serious evolution here, futuristic design, I believe that there is a direct proportional development of easiness to handle technology and revolutionary shapes which I happen to admire a lot.