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http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=3646

If this works as promised, you could run cards from Nvidia and ATI together in SLI/CF-like configurations.
For example, You could snag a brand-spanking-new AMD HD5870 to go along with your current GTX285...With no issues whatsoever.
The future of the GPU industry, ladies and gentlemen, has been altered for the better.

This song has never been more appropriate:

Read about this a couple weeks ago on Reddit, very awesome indeed!

If I have enough money at the end of the year I want to build a new computer and I wanted i7 so if I can afford this board I going with it. I have done SLi before that the performance boost was minimal at best so this is great because I can just run 1 card and in a year but in a new card as my main card and use the old one to just help with the processing a bit.

...aaaaaaaand NOW I have a specific time at which I should seriously contemplate upgrading my computer. I was waiting for something like this...

Will it max out Crysis though?

(Is that joke old yet?)

bhamv3 said:

Will it max out Crysis though?

(Is that joke old yet?)

Click to expand...

This will make this joke fully irrelevant.

Feel free to pile on the "Imagine a Beowulf cluster...." jokes however.


I just thought of something: The Folding@Home guys are going to love this for Videocard processing.

How is this any better than just running two cards of the same power? Forgive the noobiness of the question.

What I gather it means is that instead of having to upgrade both cards if you're running SLI which is expensive, you can leap frog from card to card and still see large improvements in your performance.

Ah gotcha, I always planned to buy a high end card one year, then buy a second card (identical) a year later when the price drops.

It not only load-balances 2 identical videocards (think a pair of 5870s) better than AMD's Crossfire or Nvidia's SLI can, but it also allows you to combine multiple videocards that aren't even made by the same manufacturer (AMD vs NV)

---------- Post added at 12:36 PM ---------- Previous post was at 12:28 PM ----------

Shegokigo said:

Ah gotcha, I always planned to buy a high end card one year, then buy a second card (identical) a year later when the price drops.

Click to expand...

GAAAAAAH! I hate to :deadhorse: but after what everyone has repeatedly told you, (ignoring this new technology) why in the hell would you do this?


Lets use the example of the GTX280. It came out, everyone was all ZOMG MOAR PLOX! Then AMD hammered down with the HD4870 & 4890.
Do you suppose that people were saying "Well, even though the competitor is cheaper,vastly more power efficient, and in many cases faster, I think I'll waste my money on another GTX280"?

Nooooo they didn't. They eBayed that GTX280 ASAP. And that was all in the space of a few months.
The performance gap of an entire year would be obscene.

I have said it before, and I'll say it again:
Traditional SLI/CF (Not this new Hydra) does not double performance over a single card. In virtually every benchmark, it has only a 40-60% increase, at twice the cost, and exponentially higher heat output.

(We assume Shego is reading this thread with intense interest...)

Saw the story when the Hydra 100 was announced. Basically, the reason it is so awesome is this:

Current SLI/CF relies on the drivers (software) to deal with splitting the graphics load up between however many cards are installed in your system. This means the software has to be tuned for the card(s) in question, which a) is somewhat of a (load) balancing act (which uses up CPU resources besides) and b) means that you generally need to have matching cards (same vendor, same series, etc).

The Hydra chip does away with all this crap and just hands the next frame in the render queue off to the next graphics card waiting in line, regardless of manufacturer, chip series, etc. This means that each individual card doesn't need to care about what other card(s) is/are installed in the system, each one just gets one frame, works on one frame, then outputs that frame and waits for another one. It's almost like RAID0 for GPUs. Best of all, so long as the Hydra chip can keep up*, you'll be able to either get incredible speed by ganging a couple of high performance cards (GTX 285 or 5870) or go with 3 or 4 mid-level lower priced cards (possibly even of mixed parentage!) to get that same or similar level of performance.

The one thing that is left out of the whole thing is this: One of the reasons you need Vista/Win7 for really impressive gaming performance is that XP won't handle more than 2 video cards. If the Hydra chip can be made to work under WinXP, that means you might be able to run up to 4 video cards under, say, a special version of WinXP which has been tuned for high performance. An interesting possibility, wouldn't you say?

--Patrick
*This is the real sticking point. Otherwise, just like the previous poster says, you've just traded a software bottleneck for a hardware one.

So basically, running two high end cards will no longer throttle each other and actually be a BIG boost instead of a minimal with heavy negatives?