Or just read my summary.
http://www.pcper.com...cle.php?aid=785
HYDRA has been in the works for a little while right now.
Currently, the multi-GPU technologies available are SLi and Crossfire, by Nvidia and ATi respectively. Unfortunately, both technologies are flawed. Let's say you have one graphics card in your system, and you can run a game at 60FPS with it. Even though it seems like you should be able to, you can't get another 60FPS by adding another card, because SLi and Crossfire use brute force methods of splitting the workloads (through Alternate Frame Rendering [one card works on one frame while the other works on another frame] and Split Frame Rendering [half the frame is rendered by one card, and half the frame is rendered by the other card]). Because of the way they work, they waste resources like memory and bandwidth, or induce latency.
HYDRA divvies up the workload differently. Basically, one GPU might render one character model, while the other GPU renders another. This way, both GPU's aren't required to have the data for both character models in their memory, and resources are saved (and put to better use).
This basically means that having two cards will finally double your frame rate, like it should've done a long time ago. At least, it will if you're using two of the same card. You see, you can combine any card you want (up to four at a time) as long as they're made by the same manufacturer (i.e. Nvidia or ATi).
So you could hold on to your old ATi HD 3870 and drop in an HD 5870 (which is a freaking beast, by the way) with no problems, and experience a significant performance boost.
Oh yeah, you might also want to check out this:
http://www.pcper.com...ts.php?nid=7796
Gaming on 3 30" monitors with a peripheral vision perspective anyone?
Overall, I'd say PC gaming is doing pretty good right now. Though it seems as though Nvidia will probably be leaving the desktop performance GPU market.
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