HIS Radeon 6970 ICEQ MIX Review @ Guru3D
I might file this product under the "WTF are they thinking?" category. When I saw this email in the news box I figured it was just another HD 6970 card review but the MIX at the end got me curious so I decided to check it out.
Manufacturers these days go to extremes to bring a graphics card to the market that is unique. With that sentiment HIS is releasing a product with a bit of difference. Roughly a year and a half ago LUCID entered the market with what they claimed to be the revolution in multi-GPU (from different brands) technology, the LUCID Hydra solution.
It caused quite a stir in the market and motherboard manufacturers quickly jumped onto the bandwagon so as not to miss that trendy boat. Unfortunately, ever since the release, LUCID Hydra has been a drama with bad scaling, a lot of incompatibility, slow driver updates; really most reviewers have cursed the chipset and me personally, I'd like to see that Hydra solution 6 feet under.
Yep, we have a video card with an onboard Lucid Hydra chip. The Lucid chip normally resides on the motherboard between the source of PCIe lanes and the target graphics cards for maximum bandwidth. However by putting the chip on the video card you can run Lucid on any motherboard at the cost of total bandwidth to your graphics subsystem. Why is this? Well, Hydra works by taking control of the graphics subsystem and deciding what card gets to do the work. The chip then reassembles the return data to generate the frame which requires dedicated bandwidth to contact the various cards. If your primary graphics slot only has 8x lanes available you can assume some of that bandwidth will be consumed by Lucid data and again by the return data from the "slave" cards working in the system.
This really isn't a huge issue with DX11 titles since most of the processing is done by the GPU however older DX9 and DX10 titles will turn out to be somewhat slower than they could be. I guess this is a small price to pay for having PhysX support using AMD graphics cards.
Related Web URL: http://www.guru3d.com/article/his-radeon-6970-iceq...
