Hardware MSI Big Bang-FUZION: Lucid Hydra arrives

"This means it had to not only create a multi-GPU hardware solution that bypassed the considerably strong driver ecosystems of both ATI and Nvidia graphics cards, but also develop drivers for every possible graphics hardware combination to work in every game, efficiently."

From what I understand I REALLY don't think that's what's going on here.

 

Unless you meant supplemental drivers.

 

@trig

thats the way things are done in the IT industry everywhere isn't it?

Actualy I'm still quite interested in the card, aparently it overclocks well, it does have CF and if I find I can get some fun coding with the thing then I'm in (if the price falls and the onboard sound is up to scratch)

 

I thought the motherboard is meant to be really good, read the preview on 3 different sites.

http://www.pcper.com/article.php?aid=815&type=expert

http://hothardware.com/Articles/Lucid-Hydra-200-MultiGPU-Performance-Revealed/?page=3

http://techreport.com/articles.x/17934/3

 

Ok, first off, I thought this was a great review as always, but I have a bone to pick with the opening remarks, "We've been hounding MSI for a while to get us their retail Big Bang-FUZION board. We've waited patiently as the..." <--- This statement contradicts itself. You can't say you were hounding someone for something and then turn around and IN THE NEXT SENTENCE say you were waiting pariently. That's all I'm going to gripe about, I swear.

 

The ATI and Nvidia driver multi-GPU ecosystem works on the presumption that it will be on a certified hardware with the link cables attached. The Hydra has to make the game software running work in a multi-GPU mode (if applicable), while keep the graphics cards in single GPU modes and forcing them to only render a portion of the screen or frames told to render by the Hydra software. Not necessarily odd/even frames given the dynamic load balancing. The software and hardware controlling the GPUs has to be a lot more dynamic than what Nvidia and ATI currently use.

It was a controlled preview run by the Hydra team. It did NOT use the MSI board but a Hydra engineering sample motherboard. Given I know what happens at this type of event, I can only allude that they might likely pick games, games areas and AA/AF modes that particularly showed a performance advantage. 3DMark scales particularly well in Hydra for example.

MSI itself denounced the previews as not representative of the final product and its Fuzion board.

We've tried to pick games from the support list you lot actually play. Popular titles that we know work and provide reproducible testing results.

Read: http://www.bit-tech.net/blog/2009/11/16/what-s-really-happening-with-lucid-hydra/

EDIT: It could just be the 32-bit version works and the 64-bit does not? We don't test 32-bit any more here but the previews were done on 32-bit and MSI internally test with 32-bit.

Oh FFS. I'll remove the patiently then. Hounding was meant to be sarcastic.

 

Wasn't this just a case of over-engineering a solution to problem that didn't really exist?

I mean, fantastic demonstration of technology, but ultimately a bit pointless...

 

it does fill me with a kind of evil satisfaction that even the mighty bindi is not immume for the grammar nazi's here...

 

Oh dear. Intel is an investor in Lucid. It seems that that a Lucid / Larrabee combo would win the epic fail / might have well spent the money on shiny things award 2010

 

well at least they tried, credit to msi. hopefullt their next version of this motherboard will be better.

 

sad it's so dependent on software to work.. as it's obviously superior to crossfire/sli when it does- that in itself should be enough to consider this over sli and crossfire

if it worked in tandem with sli/crossfire, that would solve alot of the boo-hooing over the software as you could just kick it in whatever mode worked at the time.. sli and crossfire suck worse imo and are software dependent as well

 

Its a start but and epic fail. Sorta like a young child trying to walk for the 1st time. Lets hope in the next few years it can pick itself up and run. If not, a late term abortion is on the cards!

 

I can't believe I waited over a year to see this come to fruition....100% linear gpu scaling.....WHAT A LOAD OF VERY EXPENSIVE CRAP.

 

I did get the impression when i heard about this project that it was a tad ambitious. It just seems like a hell of a lot of investment in time & effort for very little tangible benefit, on the software side.

 

Not sure if you've seen it, but on Guru3D They apparently test MW2 on hydra? Maybe they used a newer/beta driver? Sorry if ive missed it in the article.

http://guru3d.com/article/msi-big-bang-fuzion-lucid-hydra-review-test/27

 

Bugger. Major egg on face of both Lucid and MSI, and its a shame as price aside the board looks great and the idea would be the holy grail of gfx cards.

By why are there profiles for individual games? I thought the driver was to be completely agnostic of anything? Also what happend to the promise of running 4x cards at 100% power each? SLI/CFX already do a good job of 2 GPU's, its the 3'rd/4'th were they are wasted.

 

Oooooooooh. Collector's Edition hardware.

 

I dont think the performance rating was really fair to give, seeing how new it is, how innovative and different it is, and for the most part a pre-release and what it has really achieved alone is pretty huge in freeing the market.

 

sorta like the toyota puris?

 

I put it next to the DFI LanParty ICFX3200T2RG