Quote Originally Posted by Tjalve View Post
First of guys. Hydra wont run Crossfire or SLI. It will (should) run 2 or more graphics cards at the same time for higher performance.
SLI and Crossfire works mostly by letting each GPU work on a singel frame. It can also be done by drawing half the image one one GPU and the other half on the other GPU. The problem with this is that ypu need 2 GPUs with exactly the same performance. And the first GPU needs to wait for the other GPU to finish befor they start on the next frame.

Hydra uses some kind of advanced algorithm to analyze each frame and devide the work on all the GPUs in the system, based on how fast the GPU can put out images. Witch means that if ou pair a GTX 280 with an 9500GT, the 280 will do most of the work in the frame (liek light, water and other shader intesive parts of the image). The slower GPU will render the less intesive parts of the frame. Both images will then be joined togheter to form a complete frame. With two identical GPUs this would mean that the work will be devided equally and scalling will (in theory) be 100%. It also means that there are no obsticals that prevent you from using an ATI and a Nvida card in the same system. However there will be driver issues since both GPUs needs to use there seperate drivers and settings. Another good thing is that if you have 2 idetical cards, and you overclock one of them, you will se an overall performance increase without oveclocking the other card. The overclocked card simply takes more of the work and the frame will be completed faster.

I just cant wait to see how will it performs in reality
And how you want to tell the gpus what to render.. that would need massive support by ati/nv, or another possibility would be, that there would be a layer of software between dx/ogl and the gfx driver that calculates what high workload is and what not, then split it up, distribute it and rejoin the frames and then send it to the dx/ogl rendere... would need quite a bit calculation power...

Right now thats nothing more then a pipe dream... as already mentioned by some.