Mjolnir

Lucid's HYDRA technology - a third-party parallel graphics processing technology that enables either SLI orCrossfire on any chipset and promises near-linear scaling and the ability to mix GPUs from different series as long as it's from the same vendor (ATI or nVidia, but not mixed) - has starting limited production and is shipping chips to vendors so they can do trial implementation in their products during Q4 2008.

This means the next step is mass production and products hitting the shelves. The target right now is HYDRA technology on store shelves starting in early to mid 2009.

Sauce

PC Perspective's excellent article for those of you who don't know what the heck I am going on and on about.

I, for one, am following this with mucho gusto.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by citat3962 One of these days I'm going to go through all your posts and see if you've ever once posted anything positive about ANYTHING.

GeNjii-

Sick. Absolutely amazing and graphics industry propelling hardware! What I see is ATi and Nvidia relocating ALL their SLi and Crossfire driver teams to elsewhere in the company, maybe more general driver optimization (even maybe optimized for Hydra?).
I want stock! Great find +rep

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GRID Drift Club

killnine

Hrm, those are some big promises to live up to.

What about drivers? Do you need Hydra drivers as well?

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Croft

Do want.

I could buy an expensive card, say a GTX 280, then later add a 9800GTX (or something inexpensive along those lines) and get great new performance.

LegendaryC

The sauce has been censored....

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Fox_Smash

I'd love to see this in action,seems too good to be true.

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003

It will fail...

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I called it!

Grizzly Adams

wait is this a chipset? or an add in card?

why did I buy one PCI-E slot

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E8300 4.25GHz

Chunky_Chimp

Ccarey13, it's a bridge chip that motherboard manufacturers install on a board you'd buy. Put any 2 cards on from the same company, and the bridge chip will combine their power and scale it properly... hopefully. You won't need a physical bridge connector, thankfully.

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Mjolnir

Read the PC perspective article and all will become clear. Look at the pictures and you should intuitively grasp the difference between this and SLI/Crossfire.

Options are to provide mobo based chip support OR you could simply incorporate it into a dual-GPU-on-a-stick product like the 4870X2. So that single slot isn't neccessarily a dead end.

The great thing about this is that neither ATI or Nvidia have to fall on their swords to allow this to occur. It's actually out of their hands, since it's a discrete solution that doesn't rely on their chipset to enable it. Any fly-by-night mobo maker can slap one of these on their boards and you've got a mobo that will do both crossfire OR sli - no more picking a mobo to go with your graphics card or having to rely on a potentially weaker chipset simply so you can run SLI. Multi-GPU solutions anywhere, anytime, any brand.

This is how it should have been from the beginning. But making it proprietary is more lucrative, so we ended up with the mess we currently have today.

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Quote:

Originally Posted by citat3962 One of these days I'm going to go through all your posts and see if you've ever once posted anything positive about ANYTHING.