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Question about the "Hydra" technology.

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killem2

Member
Joined
Jan 6, 2005
I'm really excited about this. Mainly because for the longest time I always though the traditional SLI and Crossfire allowed mix and match and it was only about a year ago I found out his wasn't true lol. So yeah it was a heart breaker. So this technology that will be coming forth, i just wanted to know,

Is it possible for Nvidia or Ati to still by pass this in anyway to keep people from either:

1. Using ATI + Nvidia cards together.
2. Using Different GPU even with the same company (example: Blocking an 8800GT and a GTX 285)


I don't really understand the inter workings of all this, I just know the recap of "it lets us use what ever we basically want to" :screwy:

Thanks for any help on this. :bang head
 
Yep. nVidia has graciously added a "feature" to their driver that will prevent PhysX from working if ATI drivers are installed at the same time, according to an "interview" on Legit Reviews. That last sentence is rather hypocritical, because they're preventing their driver from working with their cards in certain cases.

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1093/6/ said:
Legit Reviews: NVIDIA recently disabled a feature in your Windows 7 drivers that would allow you to run an ATI Radeon HD series graphics card and then a secondary NVIDIA GeForce graphics card as a dedicated PhysX GPU. Why was this done and will we ever see support for this opened up down the road?

We don’t have the QA resource to test all of our GPUs acting in concert with an ATI GPU for rendering. In addition, we work hard to bring new technologies to market like PhysX and 3D Vision. The fact that our drivers only work with our cards should not be surprising to anyone.
 
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From what I understand, the Hydra chip will intercept the DX calls, and decide how to split up the calls and which card to send them to. The OS talks to Hydra, and Hydra passes on the calls to the Video Driver. The Hydra processing is essentially "in front" of the Video Driver, and talks to the card in a normal fashion, so I don't see how they could thwart this via Video Drivers.

:cool:
 
The Hydra processing is essentially "in front" of the Video Driver, and talks to the card in a normal fashion, so I don't see how they could thwart this via Video Drivers.

I've never written a driver for Windows, so I'm not sure what kind of visibility there is, but since nVidia claims to be disabling PhysX if ATI card/driver is detected, it is implied that one driver can see any other driver installed. I don't see how you don't see how they could thwart this via video drivers, as long as nVidia isn't making idle threats.
 
That would mean that you couldn't even run an Nvidia and ATI card in the same system (w/o any SLI/Crossfire/PhysX going on). If the graphics makers take this beef that far, then I believe they would be shooting themselves in the foot while solidifying their anti-competitive nature (lawsuit, anyone?).

As it stands now (and I'm not a gamer nor have any reason for more than 1 card), I believe you can run an ATI card for one task (primary monitor, for example), and run an Nvidia card for extra monitors or whatever, correct? If this is true, then I don't see any way to prevent the Hydra from talking to each card SEPERATELY, and then re-assembling the output. I dunno - I'm an Audio Dude :p

:cool:
 
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