Lucid HYDRA Engine Multi-GPU Technology

[Rob Williams]

Can either of the SLI and Crossfire technologies be defeated by a company we've never heard of before? Hard to say, but Rory's look into Lucid and their Hydra Engine can definitely give us some insight.

One of the more exciting third-party demonstrations we saw at Intel's 2008 Developer Forum was by a little-known company called Lucid, who promises highly-efficient multi-GPU performance scaling via their unique "Hydra Engine" technology. We take a look at Hydra Engine, and what it means for ATI's Crossfire and NVIDIA's SLI.

Read the article, then discuss!

 

[Kougar]

It's one of those too good to be true things . Theoretically I don't know of a single reason it shouldn't work, but attempting to get everything to work smoothly with such good scaling would take a massive amount of work or some very smart/innovative software/hardware tricks.

Lucid needs to deliver on this or allow sites to bench test the technology before I will get excited over it. Because if this approach was so easy to implement, you can be sure either NVIDIA or ATI would have done so already...

 

[Merlin]

It's one of those too good to be true things . Theoretically I don't know of a single reason it shouldn't work, but attempting to get everything to work smoothly with such good scaling would take a massive amount of work or some very smart/innovative software/hardware tricks.

Lucid needs to deliver on this or allow sites to bench test the technology before I will get excited over it. Because if this approach was so easy to implement, you can be sure either NVIDIA or ATI would have done so already...

Time to check out the stock market....
The stocks may take a good trend

Merlin

 

[Unregistered]

I hope Nvidia or ATI er I mean AMD buy this company

Maybe even Intel so they could integrate it into a next gen on board graphics platform in co-op with NVidia or AMD lots of possibilities

 

[Kougar]

ATI/AMD can't afford to buy diddly right now. Their credit rating & asset-to-liabilities ratio are both poor so they couldn't even if they wanted to.

NVIDIA just got suckerpunched with a loss out of what was supposed to be a very profitable quarter for them, but they could still easily afford Lucid I'm quite sure. Going by the company's past behavior though, I don't see this happening.

 

[HouseOfBugs]

I would rather them stay themselves so that there is none of this you only use OUR GPU's on OUR motherboards.

Know what I mean?

 

[Rob Williams]

I would rather them stay themselves so that there is none of this you only use OUR GPU's on OUR motherboards.

Know what I mean?

I tend to agree, since if it's a chipset, it could simply be either integrated onto the motherboard or a special graphics card. If NVIDIA picked it up, they might very-well limit the technology to their own cards, which is not going to make the consumer the true winner.

I think we'll learn a lot more about this technology in the months to come... I really hope it's able to deliver upon all of its promises.