News - MSI's GPU-mixing Big Bang Fuzion hits retail

[HEXUS]

The board that could free us of multi-GPU restrictions is here, but the addition of a Lucid Hydra 200 chip doesn't come cheap.

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[shaithis]

Wasn't this benchmarked and shown to be quite poor?

Also, Scan have it listed at around £270, although not in stock.

[Biscuit]

No next gen I/O... very dissapointing.

Also Hexus dudes... x18 x8 x8 for the PCI-E?

[mikemikemi]

Wasn't this benchmarked and shown to be quite poor?

Also, Scan have it listed at around £270, although not in stock.

Pricey.

Performance wasn't that poor but not quite as good as crossfire, can't remember how it compared to sli.

Main issue was that games required profiling and unless Hydra has an army of people to do this, performance might not be that good in a lot of games or you'll need to wait for a profile to become available.

Although, no mention of whether has micro-stuttering, that people complain about for dual card setups.

[GaryRW]

I think this just falls wide of the mark. The target audience for Lucid Hydra has always seemed to me to be the people who would like to use their old graphics card when upgrading. I think that inevitably implies that those are cost conscious people, as if they were all out for the best performance you could just look to SLI or Crossfire and 2 of the latest, greatest cards. At these kind of prices for the hydra board though, surely any value from your old card becomes irrelevant.

I guess the other target market was people who think that SLI and/or crossfire is rubbish and want something better. Unfortunately, the reviews I've seen of current performance won't help those people...

It's a shame, it sounded really good when I first read about it. Maybe I was expecting too much of the first gen implementation.

[Terbinator]

Does this let you use a ATi card for GPU & nvidia for PhysX ?

[mikemikemi]

Does this let you use a ATi card for GPU & nvidia for PhysX ?

Doubt it, nvidia graphics drivers are coded to disable phyx when a non-nvidia card is present.

Although I think there is a hack out there to enable it again by GenL.

[Lee H]

Performance wasn't that poor but not quite as good as crossfire, can't remember how it compared to sli.

I'd like to see this again in a few months once it starts to mature a little as I'm sure performance might improve over time

It's a very good idea and is another choice for consumers who want a multi-GPU solution

[shaithis]

Doubt it, nvidia graphics drivers are coded to disable phyx when a non-nvidia card is present.

Although I think there is a hack out there to enable it again by GenL.

The GenL hacks currently work on 195.xx detonators and older......I am not sure if they will work in a Fuzion environment though.

[mikemikemi]

The GenL hacks currently work on 195.xx detonators and older......I am not sure if they will work in a Fuzion environment though.

The hack works by intercepting the code to disable physx if non-nvidia is present so I don't see why it wouldn't work. But obviously without any testing there's nothing to suggest it will work either.

[borandi]

They initially said this chip would add $70 to the cost of the board iirc. So if you remove that from the board, then does it become a cost effective product? If not, then they're pushing the price up too high (and making more profit, obv).

As more boards support the chip, the bulk cost of making it will go down, making the boards that have it cheaper, etc. etc. etc. The fact that you can buy an AM2+ board with 2 PCI E with all the gubbins for £50 still amazes me, given how much R&D have gone into the products.