Legit Reviews

Lucid HYDRA 200 Details With AMD, Lucid & NVIDIA

Last week the folks over at LucidLogix (Lucid) introduced the HYDRA 200 real time distributed processing engine. We've spent the past few days asking questions and getting answers about this agnostic multi-GPU solution from companies like AMD, Lucid and NVIDIA. Read on to see a brief background on the technology and what the companies have to say about it.

The demo that we were shown behind closed doors was of course an MSI Big Bang motherboard that was running Windows 7 and ATI Radeon HD 4890 and GeForce GTX 260 graphics cards at the same time with both cards being load balanced. Notice that the Lucid HYDRA 200 load balancing solution has no interconnects, bridges, external dongles or adapters that are needed. Both cards were running fine and we were able to change which card had the monitor output on it from the Windows 7 desktop, which was pretty slick. Lucid gave us a chance to try out PC Game titles F.E.A.R. 2: Project Origin and Bioshock to see what the future of scalable graphics looks like with the Hydra 200. We must admit that we were fairly impressed with what we saw as the technology appeared to be working without any issues on these two game titles.

Article Title: Lucid HYDRA 200 Details With AMD, Lucid & NVIDIA
Article URL: http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1093/1/

An interesting piece of tech, but I think someone is going to have to buy them out before they can go mainstream.

One thing I did notice was that both ATI and Nvidia to varying degree were pretty much dodging questions and not really giving answers that addressed the questions topics...

Example: Q, What makes your solution better the Hydra?
A, We are proud that we have the finest engineers creating drivers for over XXXX games and always strive to do the best, blah blah, blah blah blah blah….

Ok, so once again, why exactly is your solution better?

An interesting piece of tech, but I think someone is going to have to buy them out before they can go mainstream.

They are currently receiving funding from Intel. Not sure how much of the funding but as long as Intel sees potential in the technology or a means to improve their future GPU offering, the funding will continue...



There are still a bunch of questions to be answered by Lucid. It would be great if you could try and get some of the following answers from them.

1. Does the Hydra 200 also support OpenGL. If not, is there any plans to support opengGL 2 or 3? If so, would it support both windowed and fullscreen openGL applications? Using this chip to scale performance in professional 3d applications would be huge.

2.You were going in the right direction by asking if Stream, Physx, etc. were supported. Some very important things were missed. Specifically OpenCL and CUDA "I guess because PhysX is CUDa based that one is sorta answered". I'm a bigger fan of OpenCL as it's not bound to a particular manufacturer but both are going to play a bigger role in computing over the coming two years. Support for these features will be important.

This is exciting stuff. But we need more info from them.

I can't believe Lucid doesn't work in close relationship with ATI and NVIDIA. I mean, they make a supposedly revolutionary product for graphics card and don't even give them working hardware?

The technology behind the Hydra 200 sounds great... just like first generation Phenom's sounded great. Only 1 motherboard manufacturer backing them up? If ASUS and Gigabyte had something to offer, they'd make sure to draw attention away from MSI, no?

"We are not ready to release numbers at this time. However, we can say we expect to see competitive performance."
Competitive? That's not what they need. They need groundbreaking performance and scaling, else the chip is essentially pointless.

I'm starting to have real doubts about this... Of course I can see the potential, but what do they know about GPUs that ATI and NVIDIA don't? Lots of questions, hopefully some answers will come in the near future!