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Lucid Makes Multi-GPUs Easy
Posted by Chaos on August 20th, 2008, 12:58 PM

The Hydra Engine is a little chip that sits on the motherboard taking up only about 5W and requiring no heatsink. It lies on the PCIe bus physically, and logically between the DX or OpenGL software and the PCIe Bus driver. The software intercepts graphics calls and shunts them off to the Hydra 100 for 'magic'.

What happens really is magic. You can take up to four GPUs from the same manufacturer and put them together in a system. Got an old 2600 series ATI card on the shelf that you replaced with a 4850 recently? Why not plug it in and add a bit to performance, with the Hydra Engine, it just works.

The way the magic happens is the chip will dynamically read GPU time used, GPU memory used, textures left in GPU memory, pixel shader bandwidth and a host of other things in real time. It also dynamically figures out the capacity of each GPU in the system.

It knows if it needs to draw one million pixels a frame, and GPU1 has 3x the power of GPU2, that 750K pixels go to GPU1 and 250K go to GPU2. It can do the same for geometry and all the other functions on a sub-frame basis. Each frame, it reevaluates the mix, so if the scene changed from geometry heavy to shader heavy, it can deal with it in real time.

You can read the entire article at The Inquirer.

Last edited by Regeneration; August 20th, 2008 at 07:04 PM.

21 Comments
Cooool. Nvidia needs to buy this company - quickly!
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That's the only purpose of Crossfire/SLI IMHO.
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Originally Posted by Syncroneyes View Post
Cooool. Nvidia needs to buy this company - quickly!


Yep its realy sound like super idea , multi gpu dream come tru.
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screw nvidia, what they need to do is keep their dirty paws off of this one
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Originally Posted by Syncroneyes View Post
Cooool. Nvidia needs to buy this company - quickly!
Intel have already invested in this one....cool larrabee in crossfire/sli or whatever.
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I'm going to buy the add in card real quick when it's released cos you can bet one of the big players will buy them up and then only make it available with their chipset.
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I hope motherboards with this chip arent very expensive , any idea when will this be available to end users ???
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Have read previously 2009....think it said early 2009....that was for release anyway....whether that will be the chip just for mobo manufactures or if that includes the add in card I don't know.

Last edited by technogiant; August 21st, 2008 at 07:38 AM.
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"The Hydra 100 should be out around the end of the year with no price set yet. Lucid won't sell them, they will be on the motherboard, and sold by the various board makers."


So no add in card i think , only mobos with it.
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