Lucid HYDRA: Combine multi-GPU Power into one – NVIDIA, AMD ATi

Did you recently decided to make yourself a High-end Gaming Rig and ended-up in confusion of what to get. Whether to choose that new 1GHz AMD ATi Radeon HD or one of those of Nvidia CUDA/SLI powered GTX quad cores?

Well, here is the solution- Get best of both worlds.

Lucid last year promised to develop a chipset that would enable any motherboard to work with any combination of GPUs and still able to get 100 percent of the performance out of both.

It took them more than a year to fight against laws of physics 🙂 . Now, the company has unveiled its HYDRA 200 Parallel Graphics Chip, a tiny 65nm processor that, when installed on a motherboard or expansion card.

On the motherboard manufacturing and support front, MSI has eagerly showed interest, and they become the first company to sign up.  What’s even more interesting was to see their demonstration Intel P55-based Gaming Motherboard, offering a HYDRA 200 and three PCIe slots for some serious GPU power.

In-house preliminary tests show performance never seen before on MSI Big Bang motherboards running such popular game titles as Crysis, F.E.A.R.2: Project Origin, Left4Dead 2 and Bioshock.

The motherboard will be available in the stores for 2009 holiday season.

Here is the basics of How it works:

This device is capable of intercepting DirectX or OpenGL command stream before it hits the GPU, analyzing the data, and dividing up scene at an object level. Rather than rendering alternating frames, or screens split on the horizontal, this part is capable of load balancing things like groups of triangles that are associated with a single group of textures and sending these tasks to whatever GPU it makes the most sense to render on. The scene is composited after all GPUs finish rendering their parts and send the data back to the Lucid chip. Utterly amazing, no less than rocket science.

via [Anandtech]