A year ago Lucid announced the Hydra 100: a physical chip that could enable hardware multi-GPU without any pesky SLi/Crossfire software, game profiles or anything like that. At a high level what Lucid's technology does is intercept OpenGL/DirectX commands from the CPU to the GPU and load balance them across any number of GPUs. The final buffers are read back by the Lucid chip and sent to primary GPU for display.
The technology sounds flawless. You don't need to worry about game profiles or driver support,
you just add more GPUs and they should be perfectly load balanced. Even more impressive is Lucid's claim that you can mix and match GPUs of different performance levels. For example you could put a GeForce GTX 285 and a GeForce 9800 GTX in parallel and the two would be perfectly load balanced by Lucid's hardware; you'd get a real speedup. Eventually, Lucid will also enable multi-GPU configurations from different vendors (e.g. one nVidia GPU + one AMD GPU).
At least on paper, Lucid's technology has the potential to completely eliminate all of the multi-GPU silliness we've been dealing with for the past several years.
Today, Lucid is announcing the final set of hardware that will be shipping within the next ~30 days. It's called the
Hydra 200 and it
will first be featured on MSI's Big Bang P55 motherboard. Unlike the Hydra 100 we talked about last year, 200 is built on a 65nm process node instead of 130nm. The architecture is widely improved thanks to much more experience with the chip on Lucid's part.
There are three versions of the Hydra 200: the LT22114, the LT22102 and the LT22114. The only difference between the chips are the number of PCIe lanes.
The high end product will be launching in October, with the other two versions shipping into mainstream and potentially mobile systems some time later.
Izvor:
AnandTech