Lucid Hydra on Smackover 2

[Manicdan]

i thought i also heard that the lucid chip is the one that windows sees the drivers for, and then the chip manages any combination of cards

[Shintai]

i thought i also heard that the lucid chip is the one that windows sees the drivers for, and then the chip manages any combination of cards

That sounds like very complex drivers. Or how would the chip/drivers talk to the cards and utilize all their abilities.

You aint gonna go nowhere without the AMD/nVidia etc drivers.

Plus with all the going back and forth. The possible latency/shutter issues could create havok.

Also if its the chip that handle it. Will we need a new mobo with a new DirectX/OpenGL version? Or Perhaps even worse with another thing like OpenCL.

Lucid, with their Hydra Engine and the Hydra 100 chip, are going in a different direction. With a background in large data set analysis, these guy are capable of intercepting the DirectX or OpenGL command stream before it hits the GPU, analyzing the data, and dividing up scene at an object level. Rather than rendering alternating frames, or screens split on the horizontal, this part is capable of load balancing things like groups of triangles that are associated with a single group of textures and sending these tasks to whatever GPU it makes the most sense to render on. The scene is composited after all GPUs finish rendering their parts and send the data back to the Lucid chip.

Even with the Hydra 100 chip. There is no OpenGL 3.0, openCL or DirectX 11 support. Plus its PCIe 1.1 and not 2.0.

Lucid promises that you'll be able to mix and match older and newer cards from the same vendor. For example, an Nvidia 9800 will work with an Nvidia 6800. How far back the support goes, however, will probably depend on whether the two cards in question are supported by the same driver. While the ability to mix and match different cards is supported by ATI's Crossfire, it is not something the Nvidia supports with SLI.

Also, just to be clear, you will not be able to use graphics cards from both Nvidia and ATI at the same time. This is because Windows does not support the use of two different graphics drivers while rendering a 3D application.