When we look into the entire Hydra dynamic, one question continuously pops into my mind. We have two options for a multi-GPU setup. Which would be faster, native Crossfire, or Multi-GPU with Hydra?

To look into that a little closer we take two Radeon 4890 cards, first set them up in Crossfire, and then measure them up with Hydra. What would be better/faster? Let's have a look.

3DMark Vantage (DirectX 10)
3DMark Vantage focuses on the two areas most critical to gaming performance: the CPU and the GPU. With the emergence of multi-package and multi-core configurations on both the CPU and GPU side, the performance scale of these areas has widened, and the visual and game-play effects made possible by these configurations are accordingly wide-ranging.

Download: 3DMark Vantage

So it will be hard for Hydra 200 to match the refined Crossfire drivers alright. IN 3DMark Vantage, the Hydra however does a splendid job.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2

Modern Warfare 2 is set five years on from COD4 and brings a new villain into town: Vladimir Makarov. All the trouble all starts when Makarov frames the US for a terrorist attack on a Russian airport (yes, the infamous airport level). The rest of the story follows the same intertwined British and US mission format as before, and the missions are all incredible set-pieces that involve storming oil rigs, climbing icy cliffs and, of course, an adrenaline packed snowmobile chase.  Visually the 3D engine seems to be the same as the COD4 one, it's tweaked and nearly abused to push out the very best of it's capability. The result is a very decent looking game really, smoke, fog, sun, vegetation detailed texturing of objects building and characters.

Image Quality setting:

• 4x Anti-Aliasing
• 16x Anisotropic Filtering
• All settings maxed out

Here we spot a big win for the two matched cards setup in Crossfire.

Mass Effect

Controversial, and definitely one of the bigger titles of 2008. Mass Effect from BioWare. Originally released for the XBOX 360, it unveiled a vast, beautiful galaxy populated by diverse, fascinating alien races. Players stepped onto this stage as Commander Shepard, a hero at the vanguard of humanity's ascension in the arena of galactic politics, and thus began an epic story bolstered by engaging characters and rich, branching dialogue.

Set 200 years in the future in an epic universe, Mass Effect places gamers in a vast galactic community in danger of being conquered by a legendary agent gone rogue. A spectacular new vision from legendary developers BioWare, Mass Effect challenges players to lead a squad of freedom fighters as they struggle against threatening armies to restore peace in the universe.

Mass effect is showing really good Hydra scaling, but the same two cards in Crossfire are simply faster. So overall when you tally things up that boils down to performance increases for Hydra, but three wins for the same cards set up in Crossfire.

A subjective Addendum

Now then, before we head on over into the conclusion, some subjective words. We also tried creating some game profiles ourselves. Resident Evil 5 failed, Anno 1404 failed, Crysis failed, Far Cry 2 failed. That's something you need to realize. This trick with Hydra requires extensive supported game profiles, and Lucid will need to create them.

We also had a peek at the new 1.4 beta driver and for N and R modes we noticed support for titles like HAWX and Resident Evil 5.

Image quality as far as we can see is fairly good. We didn't notice disabled AA where it should be on or anything, we did however see a couple of texture issues in COD and later on with Beta 1.4 in Resident Evil 5 as well. So yes, that's not perfect either just yet.

With Hydra comes a bucket load of restrictions, and the Lucid team will have a big job cut out for them alright.